4. ‘Now it’s up to us all – not kings and queens’: the royal family at war

Writing in his diary as the Second World War neared its end, King George VI’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, described how he had lunched with his friend Cosmo Lang, ‘whose mind is as good as ever, despite his evident physical frailty (he is eighty-one)’.¹ The old archbishop, now retired from episcopal duties, had given Lascelles what the latter termed ‘good, and welcome, advice on sundry matters’, with the private secretary noting: ‘I asked him if, in his long life, he had noticed any tendency among Ministers, and government minions generally, to encroach on the privileges of the Crown, or in any way to circumscribe its dignity. He said, almost indignantly, that no such tendency existed – rather the contrary’.² In what was very likely an allusion to the way that Edward VIII’s extra-constitutional behaviour at the time of the abdication crisis had threatened to undermine Stanley Baldwin’s National Government, Lang dismissed out of hand the courtier’s concerns about political interference in royal affairs, instead suggesting the opposite was true. Lascelles raised this topic with the ex-archbishop following five-and-a-half years of a world war during which British ministers and other state actors had tried to harness the symbolic power of the monarchy to promote the war effort. However, Lascelles, first as one of two deputies to Sir Alexander Hardinge and then, after the latter’s unceremonious ousting in July 1943, as principal private secretary to the king, had managed with some success to prevent government interference in the royal household’s public relations strategy.³ While the exigencies of war had necessitated that the palace capitulate on certain points – for example, in the case of royal broadcasts at moments of national crisis – courtiers had, for the most part, carefully managed the advances of government ministers and civil servants who wanted to take advantage of the monarchy’s popular appeal to suit their own agendas. Palace officials instead seized the initiative by promoting a royal public image that was distinct from government propaganda and consistent with the pre-war emphasis on a family monarchy that was at once caring, recognizable, outwardly ‘exemplary’ in its ‘ordinariness’ and yet dignified in character.

This chapter explores how from 1939 to 1945 the House of Windsor became more adept at publicizing its media image, with the interference from government and wider concerns about the monarchy’s loss of status leading the palace to exert greater control over royal news coverage than ever before. In addition to this idea, this chapter develops three further points, the first being that a language of mutual emotional suffering became central to the monarchy’s public relations strategy as the conflict wore on. This language built on pre-war currents of empathy that connected the public to the royal family and centred on the hardships of royal life. However, amidst the more egalitarian mood that emerged on the home front, royal publicity shifted, with members of the House of Windsor emphasizing that they shared in the emotional plight experienced by their subjects in order to conjure the image of a crown and people united by the strains of war.⁴ Second, using personal testimonies, this chapter analyses how royal publicity, which emphasized that the House of Windsor and public were joined in common cause, had some positive effects on media audiences and helped to offset public criticism of perceived royal privilege at a time of national hardship. Finally, it suggests that the monarchy began actively to mythologize its wartime role long before the guns fell silent in the summer of 1945 and that this helps to account for the enduring legacy of George VI and his consort, Queen Elizabeth, as part of the popular memory of the home front.⁵

This chapter is structured differently to others in The Family Firm. Rather than focusing on a single important episode or series of connected episodes, it adopts a chronological approach in order to chart the different ways the monarchy’s public image changed over the course of a dramatic six-year period. One thing that remains constant, however, is the focus on the key protagonists of the House of Windsor, as well as courtiers behind the scenes who were instrumental in staging monarchy under wartime conditions. Media and official sources illuminate how and why the royal family’s public relations strategy changed, while Mass Observation personal testimonies and private letters written by the public to the House of Windsor in response to royal publicity reveal how the monarchy’s image was internalized by media audiences. Notably, the British government’s propaganda division, the Ministry of Information, contracted Mass Observation to collect and interpret public opinion on a range of topics during the war, including royalty, with the Mass Observation team conducting a series of investigations into popular responses to specific members of the House of Windsor and the institution of monarchy itself.⁶ Under the leadership of Tom Harrisson in the first years of the war, Mass Observation shifted its stance from trying to measure public opinion to trying to shape political opinion: it promoted a socially progressive agenda by repeatedly stressing how the ‘ordinary people’ it studied could be better served by government.⁷ Some of Mass Observation’s wartime studies of public attitudes to the monarchy emphasized popular disaffection with the institution and are characterized by an alarmist tone that needs to be treated with some caution given Harrisson’s aims to effect social and political change through his work in this period. Equally, the war witnessed Mass Observation focus its activities on the London area in particular, which meant that most of the studies of royalty and related topics were not representative of the nation at large.⁸ However, this chapter samples relevant diary entries composed by Mass Observation’s panel of regular diarists (which numbered close to 500 by the end of the war) in order to explore how people living in other parts of the UK articulated their thoughts and feelings on royal personalities and events between 1939 and 1945.⁹

Along with media sources, documents and pictures from The National Archives, the BBC Written Archives and the Royal Archives, this chapter draws on three additional types of evidence: the minutes of the Newsreel Association of Great Britain and Ireland (formed in late 1937), which help to illuminate how the relationship between the royal household and newsreel companies was formalized during the war; the oral testimony of the newsreel cameraman, Graham Thompson, who was officially employed as ‘king’s cameraman’ from 1944 in order to promote the royal family’s image through his coverage; and the aforementioned published diaries of Lascelles, which he began writing in June 1942.¹⁰ Far from offering transparent access to the workings of the palace’s publicity machine, the private secretary is a sometimes unreliable, and often taciturn, narrator of events.¹¹ It is clear from both his and the editor’s comments that the diaries were eventually meant to find a public audience, but it is also apparent from his entries that Lascelles engaged in self-censorship. He thought little of those writers who used memoir or autobiography to titillate through the disclosure of intimate revelation and he had, in his other role as keeper of the Royal Archives, conspired to destroy documents that reflected badly on the private lives of his royal employers.¹² Indeed, these are the diaries of the loyal, circumspect courtier who, on inviting the writer and politician Harold Nicolson to prepare the official biography of King George V in 1948, instructed him that he was not to reveal the ‘whole truth’ about the monarch’s life: ‘It is not meant to be an ordinary biography. It is something quite different. You [Nicolson] will be writing a book about a very ancient national institution, and you need not descend to personalities’. Lascelles also informed him ‘that [he] should not be expected to write one word that was not true. [He] should not be expected to praise or exaggerate. But [he] must omit things and incidents which were discreditable’. Writing to a friend, Nicolson apprehensively noted how, if he were to follow these strict instructions, he could ‘see George V getting more and more symbolic and less real’.¹³

The private secretary’s diaries illuminate the author’s moral outlook as well as his approach to political affairs and the role played by the monarchy in them. Although the diaries tend discreetly to avoid the day-to-day business of managing the royal family’s public image and marginalize criticism of George VI, his wife and his daughters, occasional lapses in Lascelles’s focus cast some daylight on the lengths to which he went in generating and maintaining a ‘good press’ for his employers.¹⁴ Indeed, the diaries reveal that their author was sensitive to the emotional pulling power of the mass media and that he understood the popular appeal of intimate royal publicity. Nevertheless, he took against what he described as the ‘machine-made propaganda’ of the Ministry of Information and ‘artificially-inspired articles in the Press’, which certain ministers and civil servants were ‘constantly clamouring for’ from the monarchy. For Lascelles, government propaganda lacked subtlety and instead he tried to develop a nuanced, dignified royal media image that built on pre-war traditions.¹⁵

The opening section of this chapter focuses on the royal family’s role in the first year of the war. Surprisingly little historical work has been conducted on the monarchy’s relationship with the Ministry of Information during the conflict.¹⁶ The ministry’s early wartime activities were underpinned by concerns about the British public’s morale and this led to haphazard interference in a number of areas – for example, the ministry sought to regulate newspaper content and the BBC’s output, giving rise to serious discontent among journalists and broadcasters.¹⁷ However, by the summer of 1941 three ministers of information had come and gone (including Sir John Reith, the former director-general of the BBC) and the role was then taken up by the Conservative MP Brendan Bracken, who was a close political ally of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and he remained in post until the end of the war. Compared to his predecessors, Bracken adopted a more laissez-faire approach to propaganda and, believing the public’s morale to be essentially sound, he let the outside organizations through which the Ministry of Information had initially sought to convey the government’s propaganda line exercise greater freedom in pursuing their own objectives. The monarchy was one such institution, but since 1939 it had resisted pressures from the ministry to become a mouthpiece of the government’s wartime policy. Historians have tended to emphasize that the ministry tried to use royalty as part of its campaign to boost public confidence in the crisis years of 1940–1 during the Nazi’s aerial bombardment of British cities and when invasion seemed imminent. However, it is clear that despite early attempts by the Ministry of Information to leverage the power of the king and queen’s public personae by scripting radio broadcasts for them, the palace and its allies succeeded in restricting the ministry’s influence over the monarchy’s image by resisting changes they deemed incompatible with the royal family’s pre-war reputation.

The opening section of this chapter also examines how George VI’s shortcomings (as discussed in chapter 3) continued to undermine his position as Britain’s symbolic figurehead; and how in response to this Queen Elizabeth adopted a more conspicuous public role at the start of the war that was generally welcomed by her subjects and helped to ensure the monarchy remained relevant at a time of uncertainty. This strategy was crucial because the duke of Windsor was set on playing an active role in the nation’s war effort and his participation diverted public attention away from George VI and his consort. He was dispatched across the English Channel in a liaison role with the British army but, in summer 1940, with the Nazis’ invasion of western Europe, the duke’s hurried retreat across France to the Iberian peninsula led to concerns emerging among sections of the public regarding the crown’s leadership in wartime: a Mass Observation file report compiled in July 1940 revealed that ordinary people’s attitudes towards the monarchy were mostly ambivalent, with members of the public criticizing the duke and already articulating some of the anti-elite, ‘people’s war’ sentiment that would come to define official wartime propaganda.¹⁸

The second section moves on to consider how the Blitz of 1940–1 created a much-needed role for the king and queen by providing them with an opportunity to demonstrate their sympathy for their people’s plight. Courtiers orchestrated royal tours of bombed-out areas in London and the regions as informal events that brought together the royal couple and their subjects in intimate union. Once again, far from bowing to pressure from government officials to publicize widely the royal visits to blitzed communities, the royal household maintained tight control over the media arrangements for the tours, not only to ensure the king and queen’s safety but in order to shape a publicity campaign that stressed the monarchs’ personal sympathy for their people. This message notably gained momentum following the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Buckingham Palace in September 1940: under the coordination of royal and Ministry of Information officials, the media presented it as evidence of a shared suffering that united the monarchs and their subjects. Furthermore, this narrative was projected in the broadcast delivered by Princess Elizabeth a month later when she told listeners that she and her sister, Margaret, had experienced the same kind of family separation as other British children as a result of evacuation.

The third and final part of this chapter examines a series of episodes from spring 1943 through to the VE Day celebrations of May 1945. By the end of 1942 it was widely believed by British political elites that Hitler and Nazi Germany would not win the war and that it was simply a matter of time before the Allies prevailed.¹⁹ In keeping with these predictions, the monarchy sought to consolidate a narrative of royal leadership as part of a victorious war effort, despite the fact that there remained an undercurrent of public doubt about the royal family’s role in what was now widely presented as the ‘people’s war’. For example, the public attitudes Mass Observation recorded in response to the sudden death of Prince George, duke of Kent, during an RAF flying mission in summer 1942 indicated that, while the House of Windsor could suffer ‘the same as anyone else’, they were also deemed to be privileged, with respondents noting that the royal bereaved would not experience the same material hardships as ordinary British people who lost loved ones to the fighting. And, with large swathes of the population envisioning a more equal post-war society following the publication of the Beveridge Report in late 1942, the royal household had to work hard to crystallize a vision of a king and queen united with their people in opposition to fascism and equally determined to build a better future. This final section examines how the palace elevated the royal family through a series of co-ordinated publicity campaigns in the last years of the conflict and, in so doing, initiated a process of royal myth-making that has ensured the House of Windsor’s long-lasting association with the war effort.

‘They’re only figureheads, but they’re something to look up to’

Three months before British prime minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, the recently re-formed Ministry of Information began to develop a royal public relations strategy in readiness for the outbreak of hostilities. The ministry anticipated that George VI would want to deliver some kind of message to his people in the event of war and so started in late June to prepare a number of draft broadcasts that the king might use. In so doing, civil servants were signalling their belief in the positive effects a royal message could have on British listeners, drawing as it would on the sovereign’s authority as the nation’s symbolic leader.²⁰ Officials believed that propaganda worked best when it was grafted onto comprehensible systems, hence the ministry tried to use pre-existing publicity channels such as the publishing industry, the BBC and the monarchy in order to disseminate its messages, knowing full well that the respect commanded by these institutions would also help to disguise government involvement.²¹ The Ministry of Information’s plans for the royal broadcast also revealed the constraints within which its propagandists operated. The ministry faced a fundamental problem in that propaganda was deemed antithetical to British values, with many officials expressing misgivings about any form of disinformation campaign. As historian Jo Fox has argued, the ministry thus drew on older ‘liberal traditions’ of publicity – such as royal messages – to communicate the government’s case for war to the public.²² George VI had publicly endorsed his prime minister’s policy of appeasement between 1938 and 1939 and it was therefore vital that he be seen to make the case for war after diplomacy had failed. However, in its efforts to refocus the royal public image in readiness for war, the Ministry of Information encountered a number of obstacles – notably an ignorance among civil servants concerning how royal public relations worked (stemming from the secrecy that enshrouded the court) and, more significantly, opposition from palace officials and allies of the royal household, who were intent on controlling the monarchy’s media strategy.

Under the leadership of the civil servant A. P. Waterfield, the pre-war ‘shadow’ Ministry of Information also planned to produce 15 million print-outs of George VI’s opening wartime broadcast, including a facsimile of the king’s signature, to be delivered by the Post Office to every home in Britain at a total cost of £16,000.²³ In justifying this undertaking to the Overseas and Emergency Expenditure Committee, the ministry stressed that the message would ‘act as an initial stimulus to patriotism and loyalty and as a permanent reminder for fortitude in the trials ahead’.²⁴ For government propagandists, then, the king’s words would help to generate support for the war in much the same way as his father’s public image had worked to endorse mobilization and recruitment to the armed forces in 1914.²⁵ In this respect, an older tradition of kingship, in which the sovereign acted as both the embodiment of the state and as the rallying-point for wartime national sentiment, was reimagined by civil servants at the Ministry of Information. Yet, while George VI’s message was designed to reawaken certain historic concepts, it also encapsulated contemporary concerns. Early drafts of the broadcast prepared by civil servants at the ministry reveal a preoccupation with the protection of British democracy against fascist tyranny – an ideological contest that had taken on particular significance in the mid 1930s – as well as a desire to prepare citizens for the psychological hardships to come. As with the ministry’s plans for its first poster campaigns, the drafts of the king’s message reflected the protracted deliberations over whether citizens on the home front needed to be readied for the horrors of aerial bombardment in order to avert mass panic.²⁶ Indeed, it is significant that the references to the public ‘standing firm’ and ‘carrying on’ first included in the ministry’s early drafts of the message found their way into the final version of George VI’s broadcast, with the king instructing listeners ‘to stand calm and firm and united at this time of trial’.²⁷

Waterfield ultimately handed over responsibility for the drafting of the king’s message to the home secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, who oversaw the Ministry of Information’s activities in the lead up to war. Waterfield recommended that other ‘versions [of the message be] prepared by persons accustomed to a different outlook on public affairs from that of the Civil Service’ and suggested that this might include either the archbishop of Canterbury or Stanley Baldwin.²⁸ Hoare subsequently forwarded the ministry’s most recent draft of the king’s speech to Cosmo Lang and invited him, as a longstanding royal advisor, to prepare his own version. The men’s correspondence reveals that the archbishop was reluctant at first, partly because he was on holiday but also because of the difficulty involved in writing a suitable message ‘in cold blood’ before war had been declared. Lang found Hoare in agreement, though, that the speech should focus on Britain’s ‘resistance to brute force’ rather than the ‘defence of democratic ideals’, as was the main theme of the ministry’s draft. ²⁹ The archbishop was better versed in the personalized imagery used in royal broadcasts and may have thought that the theme of democracy was too abstract for some listeners, who would rather hear their king state plainly that Hitler was a tyrant and their enemy. After a second request from Hoare, Lang agreed to write and sent the home secretary a draft that was passed on to George VI, who ‘was delighted with it’.³⁰ The ministry then agreed some last-minute changes with the king’s assistant private secretary, Alan Lascelles, who had final say over its content.³¹

The exchanges between the Ministry of Information, Hoare, Lang and courtiers reveal two things: first, that the Ministry of Information sought to harness the power of the king’s public image in order to further its own aims; second, that this threw up something of a challenge to the palace, which wanted to retain control over royal publicity. The danger for the royal household was that mistakes made by the ministry could have a negative impact on the crown. This was demonstrated early on when the scheme to distribute printouts of the king’s message was suddenly abandoned by the ministry due to a national paper shortage in autumn 1939, but not before the ministry’s news division had broadcast a radio bulletin telling listeners that they should expect to receive a copy of the speech ‘to keep … as a permanent record’.³² George VI’s private secretary, Alexander Hardinge, expressed his and the king’s disappointment at this volte-face: the Ministry of Information had failed in its aims and this could only have negative repercussions on the way the public viewed the monarch.³³ Fortunately for George VI and his counsellors, when it came to the speech itself, Hoare had turned to Lang, who, as chief architect of the royal public language of the 1930s, understood precisely what the broadcast demanded, with the result being that it struck many familiar notes. Following Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Sunday 3 September, the king began his first wartime speech that evening by telling listeners in words which echoed George V’s radio messages that he ‘[spoke] with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself ’. He went on to blame the war on Hitler’s ‘selfish pursuit of power’ and his ‘primitive doctrine of might and right’; he then emphasized the importance of protecting the political liberties that united the empire and Commonwealth; and the king ended his speech by beseeching God for support in ‘whatever service or sacrifice [the war] may demand’ of him and his subjects.³⁴

For the Ministry of Information’s Ivison Macadam, who was one of the founding members of the Council of King George’s Jubilee Trust in 1935 and one of the first officials involved in drawing up plans for the re-establishment of the ministry as far back as 1937, Lang’s version of the king’s speech was not as good as the original draft prepared by civil servants, as it ‘follow[ed] too much the general tradition of such [royal] Messages’. He thought the start of the war represented an ‘occasion when we could break away from this and get something more arresting’.³⁵ However, in Lang’s safe hands the broadcast followed the tradition of earlier royal messages and met with George VI’s approval. Notably, the monarch and his advisors also insisted on having the final say over the broadcast, which ensured that anything unsuitable was excised: the alternative, as we shall see, was to refuse to comply with the Ministry of Information’s requests altogether.

Civil servants at the ministry were certain that the British press would provide fulsome coverage of the king’s speech and they were right.³⁶ Newspaper coverage of George VI’s broadcast was extensive and unanimously positive.³⁷ In particular, journalists drew attention to the personal tone of the message and the domestic setting from which it was delivered. The Daily Express noted, for example, that the king had ‘crossed the threshold’ of millions of homes when he spoke to his people, while the Daily Mail’s report described how, ‘in another room in the palace sat the Queen, listening in her own home, like millions of other wives and mothers’.³⁸ The other feature of the broadcast that the press highlighted was the king’s instruction to his people that they ‘stand firm and calm and united’ in the face of danger (Figure 4.1).³⁹ Even the Daily Worker, which had been so hostile towards royalty throughout the 1930s, printed a front-page excerpt of the king’s broadcast without further comment: the war against fascism clearly demanded that British newspapers from across the political spectrum form a united front.⁴⁰

The public reaction to George VI’s speech is more difficult to gauge. While Mass Observation did not conduct a formal investigation into the way listeners responded to the broadcast, a number of its regular diarists noted that they had heard it. As with George VI’s pre-war speeches, media audiences tended to be preoccupied with his speech impediment. A seventeen-year-old bank clerk from Sidcup, Kent, recorded the sympathetic comments of the family members with whom he had listened: ‘“Poor man.” “It’s a shame.” “He is very courageous to do it.” “Bless Him”’. The diarist stated that ‘most agreed that considering his verbal shortcomings, it was a good speech’.⁴¹ Other Mass Observation diarists were less impressed, though. A thirty-five-year-old textile warehouseman from Birmingham noted that he thought ‘the Kings [sic] speech sounded like one of a fagged man … He seemed to want to comfort his subjects, but knew that no words of his could cover the unpleasant wound which had been prised open in the morning’.⁴² The empathetic tone of the broadcast thus seems to have resonated with this listener, but his praise was moderated by what he otherwise deemed an uninspiring performance. Philip Ziegler’s analysis of Mass Observation diarists’ responses to George VI’s broadcast on 3 September tallies with the evaluation presented here: that the main reaction recorded by listeners was their focus on the monarch’s stammer. Indeed, Ziegler has suggested that this emphasis on the king’s delivery persisted throughout the war and that the number of diarists who tuned in to listen to his wartime broadcasts steadily declined.⁴³

Figure 4.1. ‘Stand Calm, Firm and United!’, Daily Sketch, 4 September 1939, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

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Given the problems that George VI faced as a lacklustre public speaker, it is little wonder that the Ministry of Information sought to co-opt other members of his family who were better communicators into delivering wartime public addresses. The government anticipated that the conflict would require unprecedented sacrifices on the home front both in terms of war work and also because the public would be affected as a result of attacks by enemy aircraft on British soil. The urgent need to mobilize civilians fell in part to civil servants at the Ministry of Information, who were anxious about how to prepare Britain’s female population for the mass evacuation of children (and, in some cases, mothers themselves) from the towns and cities that officials thought would be targeted by the Luftwaffe.⁴⁴ Before the war, Queen Elizabeth had proven herself a competent public speaker. The final speech she delivered to the crowds that had gathered to say farewell to her and the king at the end of the 1939 royal tour of Canada and the US had been broadcast and filmed.⁴⁵ The ministry’s initial plans to persuade the queen to deliver a radio message to the nation and the empire’s women at the outbreak of the war reveal the kind of gendered assumptions concerning the effects a speech of this kind might have on female listeners which shaped much of the ministry’s wartime work.⁴⁶ At the end of August 1939 Ivison Macadam asked A. P. Waterfield for permission to seek out a writer for this task, stating ‘here, almost more than anywhere, we shall want a fine piece of writing’.⁴⁷ Waterfield sought advice from the seventh earl of Perth, Eric Drummond, who later became a key advisor on the ministry’s propaganda strategy. He suggested the queen should not broadcast until evacuation was complete but recommended that the ministry contact the journalist Godfrey Winn to prepare a first draft of the speech. Waterfield noted in a memo to Macadam that ‘although it seems doubtful whether [Winn’s] writing could ever be called fine, there is no doubt that he has an extraordinary gift for writing stuff which appeals to women. Lord Perth thinks that he is just the man for this job’.⁴⁸ Winn had distinguished himself as a women’s advice columnist specializing in matters of love and relationships; and Perth’s nomination of him as author of the message again reveals the kind of cultural stereotypes that shaped the Ministry of Information’s attempts to appeal to a female demographic.⁴⁹

The ministry learnt at the start of September that the BBC had also considered inviting the queen ‘to broadcast a message to the mothers & children of this country & the Empire, with a special reference to the situation resulting from evacuation’. Conveying this information to Waterfield, the Ministry of Information’s B. H. Needham noted that he thought ‘a royal broadcast Message ought do a great deal not only to hearten the women & children generally, but to smooth over any feelings of dissatisfaction and concern which may be felt in some instances about the evacuation of the children & their separation from their parents’.⁵⁰ Needham added that he had advised the BBC to take no additional steps until the ministry had confirmed its own plans regarding the speech: in matters of royal publicity, the broadcaster now had to defer to ministry officials. Waterfield stated in his reply that he had spoken to Lascelles at the palace, who had thought it better that the ministry ‘hold back for a little while’. The courtier was clearly wary of establishing a new precedent by having the queen deliver a direct radio message. But the civil servant thought that if the Ministry of Information waited any longer they would ‘miss the evacuation boat’ and an opportunity to reassure Britain’s women at a time of great anxiety. His colleagues agreed and so their efforts turned to adapting Godfrey Winn’s first attempt at the speech into something the queen might actually use.⁵¹

Annotations on Winn’s original draft reveal that civil servants wanted to include ‘a special appeal to all concerned to be kind to the children & mothers who have been parted by evacuation’ – again signalling their belief that the queen’s words could help engender stability through personal reassurance at a time of social dislocation. Winn’s draft echoed the tone of earlier royal broadcasts: the queen would appeal to other wives and mothers who valued ‘the security of our homes and our children’ and would tell them that the ‘family life’ she shared with them ‘ha[d] been menaced’ by war.⁵² The concept of a mutual suffering that united crown and people and stemmed from the forced separation of families was thus established early on by the Ministry of Information and reworked in a subsequent draft prepared by civil servants in a phrase on evacuation and how it ‘affects very closely what is the dearest thing of all to us – our homes’.⁵³ These references to family life were also intended to resonate with a national culture that elevated domesticity as an essential part of what it was to be British. A Mass Observation report titled ‘What Does Britain Mean to You?’ published in September 1941 noted that ‘liberty, love of home, tolerance and justice – these are some of the things which Britain has infused into her sons and daughters’.⁵⁴ As the queen’s message slowly took shape, it was these things that speechwriters focused on in building a picture of an enemy who seemed to threaten all that the British held dear.

However, Ivison Macadam expressed dissatisfaction with his colleagues’ efforts and invited the children’s author A. A. Milne ‘to have a shot’.⁵⁵ Early on, Macadam and Waterfield had discussed how the queen’s message might also be targeted at children, so this could explain the choice of Milne, who was renowned for his Winnie-the-Pooh stories. But the resulting draft was mawkish and patronizing and took the idea of the queen’s sympathy for her people along lines of mutual suffering to an extreme.⁵⁶ Milne’s message addressed evacuation with the words ‘many of you have had to be separated from your children; well, I am with you there. But it is only for a little time, and they will be safe, and they will come back to us’. And the message ended with the queen inviting female listeners ‘to hold my hand for a moment, and to believe that with all my heart and mind and body I am thinking of you and praying for you and suffering with you’.⁵⁷ One civil servant noted in a handwritten memo that they thought the draft had ‘the right “human” touch’ and that the Ministry of Information should ‘submit it as it stands’ to the palace for review.⁵⁸ But before they could do this, Waterfield had shown Milne’s draft of the broadcast to Sir Edward Grigg, now parliamentary secretary to the ministry but previously a royal advisor on the public relations of the prince of Wales’s imperial tours in the 1920s.⁵⁹ Grigg adopted a more sceptical approach, akin to that of Lascelles, over the necessity of the queen’s radio message in the first place, suggesting to Waterfield that such a broadcast instead ‘be made to arise naturally out of an appropriate occasion [such as] the publication of the first big casualty lists or possibly the first air raid’. Waterfield also reported that Grigg ‘thought the whole tone of [Milne’s draft] was too “Christopher Robinish”’ and would ‘definitely prefer to see it re-written’.⁶⁰

At Grigg’s suggestion other authors were briefly considered, including popular novelist Storm Jameson, before the whole idea of the queen’s message was temporarily shelved by the ministry. Once again, the intervention of an old royal advisor had worked to circumvent the ambitions of the Ministry of Information, which wanted to draw on the monarchy’s popularity to promote its own agenda. However, the seed of the idea was firmly planted and Queen Elizabeth finally consented to broadcast on 11 November 1939, her message notably coinciding with Armistice Day and drawing on the powerful emotions associated with the memory of the First World War.⁶¹ It is unclear why the royal household capitulated to government pressure at this point, although it is possible that they did so in the belief that the queen’s broadcast would reassure parents who had consented to be separated from their children that they were doing the right thing: over the course of October, it had become apparent that the government’s initial fears about mass air raids had been misplaced and a number of evacuated women and children had begun to return home to Britain’s urban centres.⁶²

The writer of the queen’s broadcast – almost certainly Lascelles – does appear to have at least reviewed the Ministry of Information’s earlier attempts at the speech as there are several passing resemblances that link the final version to the drafts prepared or commissioned by civil servants.⁶³ However, the end result was a tour de force in royal speechwriting and quite distinct from the ministry attempts in the way it combined a dignified, regal tone with a personal, feminine touch. As originally planned by the ministry, Queen Elizabeth addressed her words to the women of Britain and the empire. She spoke in measured terms of the importance of women’s contribution to the war effort – whether it was in ‘carrying on your home duties’, undertaking the new kinds of ‘real and vital work’ outside the home that total war required or in putting up with seeing ‘your family life broken up – your husband going off to his allotted task – your children evacuated to places of greater safety’. The author of the broadcast also clearly saw similar merits to the ministry in highlighting the shared sacrifices the war involved, as the queen then continued: ‘The King and I know what it means to be parted from our children, and we can sympathise with those of you who have bravely consented to this separation for the sake of your little ones’.⁶⁴ At the start of the war the princesses had been secretly sent to Birkhall – a royal residence on the Balmoral estate in Scotland – where, out of concern for their safety, they remained until Christmas 1939.⁶⁵ The Royal Archives contain the original script of the speech and it reveals that the word ‘know’ was underlined (as above), in order, we might assume, to ensure that as the queen read it she placed emphasis on the one phrase which conveyed her and the king’s shared sacrifice to listeners (this emphasis is also clear from the recording of the radio broadcast).⁶⁶ The empathetic language contained in the speech thus linked the queen to her female listeners through a gendered imagery of domestic life and the associated emotions of love, happiness and concern for one’s family. Notably, the broadcast’s focus on maternal responsibility and national duty also tallied with government propaganda released in late 1939 that tried to dissuade evacuated mothers from returning home to British towns and cities with their children.⁶⁷

Before delivering her broadcast, the queen had written to Cosmo Lang asking him for some last-minute help in order to ensure she included some reference to Christianity in it:

It is clear from this letter that the queen was anxious about how her broadcast would be received, particularly fearing that it might come across as ‘too homely’ – too familiar – in tone. We do not know how Lang responded to these concerns, but he did suggest two additional sentences that made the queen’s faith clear to those who tuned in. The broadcast concluded with the lines, ‘We put our trust in God, who is our Refuge and Strength in all times of trouble. I pray with all my heart that He may bless and guide and keep you always’.⁶⁹ The queen’s message therefore ended with a familiar religious flourish and Lang immediately wrote to her to commend her performance at the microphone:

It appears from personal testimonies that the archbishop was right to judge the queen’s broadcast a success with listeners and with women in particular. As had been the case with George V in the mid 1930s, members of the public wrote to Queen Elizabeth in response to her message, expressing their personal feelings in an attempt to reach out and achieve some kind of intimacy with an otherwise remote public figure. Eluned Winifred Evans from Dolgelley in North Wales was one of these people:

For this writer, the queen’s radio message had encouraged her ‘to carry on’ despite the war. She was also impressed by the public duties undertaken by the monarch and appreciated the media coverage that enabled her to keep up to date with royal activities. The personalized link that radio created between the royal family and public thus again evoked direct, empathetic responses from listeners like this one and Evans’s letter notably ended with a reciprocated religious blessing. An anonymous female listener wrote to express her feelings in much the same vein:

The writer’s words again attest to the power of royal broadcasts in inspiring listeners and in connecting them as part of an imagined community. This woman went on to describe how ‘poor health and a young son in the army who seemed to have gone beyond my love and care’ had left her feeling ‘down and under’ but that when the monarch’s ‘quiet words echoed in the room you seemed to speak to me, and gradually I saw how much a little home meant, and how important it was to keep on carrying on’. She ended her letter by stating that she wrote ‘from my heart so I hope your secretary will be kind enough to give you my letter’. Here was a listener who thought that radio had brought her into close emotional communion with the queen and felt compelled to respond in highly intimate terms that conveyed her thanks for the monarch’s uplifting words of reassurance.

These kinds of reaction extended to the queen’s friends, several of whom wrote to her in order to praise the broadcast. One notable example was the letter from the old courtier Sir Clive Wigram, who thanked the queen for ‘a wonderfully inspiring and encouraging message’ and reported that he had attended a lunch with ‘Sir John Reith and … another prominent B.B.C. official’ who ‘were loud in their praises of one of the best broadcasts that have ever gone out to the world. The tone, the pace, the pronunciation, the substance with no faltering for a word were perfect’. Wigram’s letter indicates that positive reactions to the queen’s speech were not limited to women. Nor were these simply the toadying words of a long-time loyal servant. Wigram’s sons were both in the armed forces and he confessed to the queen that:

The rare glimpses into royal private life offered by Wigram’s letter reveal that some of those close to the crown were also inspired by the example set by the British family monarchy. A number of personal correspondents also remarked that the queen’s ‘hard sacrifice of being separated from [her] children’ must have meant she ‘miss[ed] them dreadfully’.⁷⁴ Those who knew the princesses were staying at Birkhall therefore sympathized with the queen, demonstrating that the image of royal family separation – while certainly publicized in order to evoke the identification of radio listeners – was rooted in reality and generated personal feelings of compassion among friends of the monarch, too.

Of the handful of Mass Observation diarists who recorded listening to the queen’s broadcast, most did so noting their appreciation of her performance, commenting, for example, on her ‘beautiful voice’.⁷⁵ She had indeed spoken with clarity and confidence and remarks like these perhaps signalled an indirect comparison with her husband’s lacklustre performances as a public orator. A journalist who listened to the broadcast as it was ‘rediffused’ in the cinema where she was watching a film stated that ‘it was received v. respectfully. Note the emphasis on the women who stay at home to do bit [sic], and heartily agree with the sentiment though I am not one of them’.⁷⁶ When criticism was expressed it was levelled at the press for the way they had overdramatized the story of royal family separation as alluded to by the queen. A film producer from South West London was typical in recording her disdain for the newspapers’ commentaries: ‘In evening listened to the queen. Quite suitable, but why must papers next day underline it “A shade of wistfulness was there when the words ‘parted from our children’ were spoken”. No doubt, but why not trust people to appreciate that. Over-comment makes for art rather than nature’.⁷⁷ For this diarist, the press’s overt focus on the queen’s suffering detracted from her overall evaluation of the speech. Looking at the newspaper and newsreel reports on the broadcast, it is immediately evident that reporters and news editors did bring the human-interest elements of the message to the fore. The Daily Telegraph was typical in the way it presented the monarch’s separation from her children:

Since the beginning of the war, the press had celebrated the queen’s example in agreeing to send her children out of harm’s way, no doubt in part to encourage other women to make the same sacrifice. In October the Sunday Pictorial began a special series of weekly articles written by journalist Mavis Cox on Queen Elizabeth’s daily routine in the changed circumstances of war, which included descriptions of her war work, her promotion of the women’s voluntary units and her role as a domestic figure: ‘We must remember, that she, too, is a mother separated from her children, and that this separation means as much to her as to the humblest mother whose kiddies have been evacuated for reasons of safety’.⁷⁹ Articles like these were addressed primarily to female readers and invoked the queen’s role as a wife and mother in the context of the war effort on the home front. According to reports like these, she was a ‘woman fellow-sufferer’ who had bravely consented to temporary separation from her children for the good of the nation.⁸⁰

Queen Elizabeth notably allowed a newsreel cameraman to record a version of her broadcast – the first member of the royal family to do so – and Pathé Gazette interspersed its subsequent film of her delivering the message with footage of mothers waving farewell to their evacuee children at train stations and scenes of host families welcoming them to their new homes in the countryside (Figure 4.2).⁸¹ Other footage in this newsreel included the monarchs’ observance of Armistice Day at the cenotaph and, as the soundtrack relayed the queen’s words on the importance of women’s wartime activities, the film cut to scenes of nurses and the women’s auxiliary forces on parade as part of the Armistice procession. The message conveyed through innovative newsreels like this one, which saw the media of film and radio converge, was that British women had contributed to one world war and were ready to do so once again.

The media therefore used the queen’s broadcast as an opportunity to stress the role that she was playing in leading women through the war. Press articles included a Daily Mirror piece that focused on the ‘five mothers from working-class districts of Glasgow’ who had listened to the monarch’s broadcast from their new home on the Balmoral estate. According to the Mirror, these women and their children were ‘guests of the queen’, having been evacuated to the country – clearly implying that the royal family were doing their bit in hosting city dwellers.⁸² Meanwhile, a Sunday Express article published the day after the queen’s broadcast stated that she had ‘made up her mind to become the real as well as the titular head of Britain’s women at war’ and that this involved many difficulties, not least of which was running Buckingham Palace as a comfortable home despite the various material restrictions that the conflict imposed on her and other ‘housewives’.⁸³

Figure 4.2. ‘The King and I know what it means to be parted from our children’. Bentley Archive/Popperfoto © Getty Images.

From the very beginning of the war, then, older ideas about the burdens of royal public life and the national responsibilities that came with it fused with new narratives about the hardships that the royals experienced alongside the British public as a result of family separation and the testing circumstances of war. These messages were readily taken up by the press, newsreels and radio and persisted through the winter of 1939 to the summer of 1940, with the king and queen regularly appearing in news reports that emphasized the monarchs’ keen interest in military and civilian preparations and the way they were courageously facing up to the privations of war alongside their people.

*

We now know that the media inflated the stories of suffering faced by royalty in order to stress the ‘equality of sacrifice’ that supposedly characterized the war on the home front.⁸⁴ For example, in January 1940 Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were moved from Birkhall to Royal Lodge in the grounds of Windsor Castle, but the narrative of a royal family separated by war was maintained despite the fact that the royal children now regularly saw their parents and, from May 1940, spent most nights with them at Windsor Castle.⁸⁵ Importantly, narratives of royal suffering appear to have had some of the desired effects on the way media audiences perceived their royal rulers, as is revealed by a Mass Observation file report that sought to illuminate public attitudes towards the House of Windsor in July 1940. The file report was based on an analysis of answers to ‘indirect questioning’ and a ‘collection of a number of overheard remarks’. It also included a summary of ‘observations made of the content of news-reels and the reactions to them’. Although by no means representative of British public opinion as a whole, the file report is interesting for the ambivalent thoughts and feelings it recorded on royalty.⁸⁶ On the positive side, it is clear the idea popularized in the 1930s that royal life was a burden worked to generate some support for the protagonists of the House of Windsor. The compiler of the study noted that ‘a number of people mention that the King and Queen have a very difficult job, and it is generally considered that they do it well, in spite of difficulties’. Several comments were included to support this statement:

Members of the public also identified with the gendered personalities of the royals. Asked what they thought of the king and queen, one respondent stated that ‘they’re nice homely people – and she’s a wonderful mother’. Another replied: ‘I think the Queen is the most popular – they both get on well with the ordinary man’. Phrases like these suggest that the official projection of the maternal side of the queen’s personality and the consistent emphasis on the ‘normal’ qualities of royal family life helped to generate positive forms of identification with them among members of the public who saw the monarchs as ‘homely’, ordinary people.

These positive attitudes towards the royal family were, however, tempered by more negative comments; these were in the majority and hinted at an underlying disinterest or even disaffection with the royal family. The introduction to the report asserted that ‘it was found that interest in the Royal Family had decreased during the War period, and often the subject of conversation drifted to topics more directly connected with the war’. The ‘lack of interest’ recorded by Mass Observation was backed up by a selection of comments, including that of a twenty-year-old middle-class man: ‘I think they’re quite nice people, quite harmless, but redundant – is that the word? – unnecessary. I’m not very interested in them’. Two comments that echoed this one also hinted at the way an anti-elite mood was taking hold of sections of the public as a result of official propaganda campaigns like that of broadcaster and writer J. B. Priestley, who consistently valorized the heroism of the ‘little man’ while denigrating older social hierarchies as part of what was fast becoming known as the ‘people’s war’.⁸⁷ A working-class woman aged forty-five was reported saying: ‘I think it’s all a bit silly – Kings and Queens in wartime. I don’t think they’re wanted. All them things are all right in peacetime – we like to have ceremonies, and royal robes, – but now it’s up to us all – not Kings and Queens. That’s what I think anyway’. A thirty-year-old male labourer thought the same: ‘Kings and Queens don’t make much difference when it comes to wars and so on. Ours are just figureheads, and that shows more than ever in wartime’.

The idea that royalty was relatively ineffectual – ‘redundant’ as one young man put it – and that they were primarily ‘figureheads’ was reiterated by several interviewees, one of whom alluded to both the positive and negative elements of this symbolic role: ‘Well, I look at it like this – they’re only figureheads, we all know that – the King doesn’t ‘ave any say in the Government. They’re only figureheads, but they’re something to look up to – you can’t imagine England without a King or Queen’. The respondent highlighted the symbolism of modern kingship, which is possibly indicative of the way the constitutional, non-partisan interpretation of monarchy celebrated at the time of the 1937 coronation had taken root among the British public.⁸⁸ However, while the king and the queen might be ‘something to look up to’, the fact they were simultaneously described as ‘ only figureheads’ is a stark reminder of the way the abdication had witnessed the replacement of a dynamic and outspoken king, renowned for his forthright leadership style, with a man whose very lack of personality meant that politicians and the media were able to cast him as the purest example of the powerless constitutional sovereign. The Mass Observation report thus hints at the way members of the public were uncertain of the leadership George VI could provide at a time of national crisis. Furthermore, the forceful presence of his older brother, the duke of Windsor, during the first months of the war not only served to highlight the king’s lack of charisma (as had been the case at the time of his crowning), but also became a distraction that worked to undermine public confidence in the monarchy’s wartime leadership.

As we saw in the previous chapter, far from being marginalized by the media after the abdication crisis, as some historians have suggested, Edward remained a regular fixture in the press and newsreels – in part because news editors could simply not afford to ignore him, given his enduring popularity.⁸⁹ At the beginning of the war he demanded that he be given an opportunity to participate in the fighting in some meaningful way (as had been the case in 1914) and, at the behest of his brother (who wanted him out of the public eye) and the War Office, he was sent to France in the role of a liaison as part of a British military mission to report back on the French army’s preparations for the war ahead.⁹⁰ The duke’s subsequent activities in the autumn of 1939 were widely reported by the media.⁹¹ A Mass Observation study on the well-known personalities filmed by the newsreels in the first five months of the war suggested that he was the most popular member of the royal family to feature in them – that is, according to the number of times his appearance on screen was applauded by cinema viewers (which was just one of the many unscientific methods developed by Mass Observation investigators in these years to gauge how media audiences felt about public figures).⁹² Although George VI and his consort appeared in a slightly higher number of newsreels in the period from September to January 1940, they were applauded on far fewer occasions. If this study had any bearing on public opinion, it would seem that Edward still outshone his younger brother among some cinemagoers despite his abdication and marriage to the duchess and his dubious, highly publicized visit to Nazi Germany in October 1937.⁹³ It is also notable that, although he was now a former king, the newsreels which reported the duke’s activities highlighted the same popular appeal and go-getting energy that had been his trademarks as monarch and prince of Wales. Commentators drew attention to the warm welcome he received on ‘returning’ to Britain, his pleasure at ‘coming home’ and his determination to fulfil his mission in France (Figure 4.3).⁹⁴

The government and royal household secretly worked to prevent the duke from visiting British troops stationed in France, partly so that he did not upstage the king as the leading representative of the House of Windsor on the other side of the English Channel.⁹⁵ But Edward discovered this and kicked up a fuss about the way he was being treated, which led to a further souring of relations with the king. Although George VI eventually relented and allowed his brother to inspect home regiments by prior arrangement, this episode led the duke to question the importance of his role in France and his doubts escalated when German forces suddenly broke the French line in mid May 1940. He quickly travelled to the south of France, where the duchess of Windsor was staying and where he undertook a series of visits to French battalions on the Italian border. But when Italy declared war on France on 10 June, the duke was again forced to flee the enemy – this time along with his wife and retinue – first to Spain and then, at the beginning of July, to Portugal.

During this frenzied period of retreat across the Iberian Peninsula, the British government tried to work out what to do with the duke and duchess, fearing they might be captured by the Nazis and used as political pawns.⁹⁶ According to Edward’s biographer, the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, proposed to arrange for transport to bring the couple back to Britain, but the duke rejected this offer on the grounds that he could stomach neither an ignominious return nor a reunion with his family. The solution devised by Churchill and agreed to by George VI was that Edward and the duchess would board a ship to the Bahamas, where he would spend the rest of the war as governor of the islands. The duke eventually agreed to this plan and he and his wife set sail from Lisbon on 1 August 1940.⁹⁷

Figure 4.3. ‘The Duke of Windsor – Home After Nearly Three Years’, Daily Express, 14 September 1939, p. 12. © The British Library Board.

Mass Observation reports and the media coverage of the duke’s activities in summer 1940 help to explain why Churchill and George VI effectively banished Edward to the Bahamas. The duke’s liaison role in France had initially kept him busy and after a while the media concerned themselves with more pressing war-related stories. A second Mass Observation study on the newsreels’ coverage of popular personalities (this time in the four months from the end of January to May 1940) recorded that ‘the Duke of Windsor, the most popular of Royal figures, has not be [sic] observed once’.⁹⁸ British officials and royal courtiers who had viewed the duke’s attention-grabbing activities at the start of the war with trepidation could content themselves in the knowledge that reporters had lost interest in Edward’s inspections of allied soldiers and fortifications along the Maginot Line.⁹⁹ Indeed, this trend began at the end of 1939, right at the time that George VI undertook his own highly publicized trip to France to visit his troops. But press reports and the Mass Observation study on the monarchy from the summer of 1940 reveal why officials back in Britain had been right to worry about the potentially negative effects the duke’s activities might have on both the war effort and the crown’s reputation. Over the course of June and July newspapers published a spate of unfavourable reports on the duke’s retreat from France across Spain to Portugal.¹⁰⁰ Journalists questioned whether he had deserted the British mission to which he had been attached (an accusation he refuted at the time and which has since been disproved by his biographer) and, in the case of the communist Daily Worker, under a cartoon that ridiculed the wartime narrative of ‘equality of sacrifice’, whether a private soldier would have been allowed to behave in the same way.¹⁰¹ The Mass Observation file report from July 1940 on public attitudes to the monarchy similarly reveals that Edward’s flight from France led to popular concerns arising about royalty’s reliability in wartime. It included the comment of a forty-year-old housewife: ‘[T]here are some not too nice stories floating around about the Duke of Windsor. I was never particularly keen on him though, I’m glad he went’. Investigators interpreted this comment as part of a wider body of negative remarks expressed by interviewees about other European royalty, specifically regarding the Belgian king’s capitulation to Nazi Germany and the rumour that the king of Romania was preparing to abdicate. Based on these comments, Mass Observation judged that ‘there is a feeling well based on precedent, that Royalty is something different from the mass of people, and under present stresses, will slide off the top of the country into another country when things get tough’.¹⁰²

As already noted, the same Mass Observation file report suggested that there was a cooling in public attitudes towards George VI and Queen Elizabeth, a finding which was supported by MO’s data on newsreels, too: although both monarchs appeared in twice as many newsreel films in the period from the end of January to May 1940 compared to the first five months of the war, their popularity decreased according to the number of times they were applauded by cinemagoers. The Mass Observation investigators suggested this decline was ‘due to the fact that they [the monarchs] are always seen visiting factories, civic centres, or the King on his own awarding medals. Every sequence is similar to the last’.¹⁰³ It is true that the royal newsreel coverage of this period was formulaic and repetitive, but the other difficulty royalty faced in 1940 was that Nazi Germany’s rapid advance across Europe meant that the newsreels increasingly focused their attention on how Britain’s politicians and the military were responding to the war. Indeed, all the Mass Observation studies on newsreels from 1940 recorded that Churchill was far and away the most popular personality to feature in them, having received the loudest and most consistent applause from cinemagoers both before and after becoming prime minister on 10 May.¹⁰⁴

Churchill’s popularity in the summer of 1940, after he had cautiously celebrated the ‘miracle’ of the British Expeditionary Force’s evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk and, later, the victories of ‘the few’ in the dramatic air battles against the Nazi Luftwaffe, needs to be considered against the apparent loss of confidence in other British leaders in this period, including royalty.¹⁰⁵ The July 1940 Mass Observation file report concluded by noting that the House of Windsor’s prestige ‘has slightly but distinctly declined in recent months’, partly, it claimed, because of the failings of other royal persons, including the duke of Windsor, and partly because ‘the symbolic value of Royalty has hardly been exploited since the outbreak of war’.¹⁰⁶ As the next section shows, the events of autumn 1940 provided the royal family with the perfect opportunity to re-establish their symbolic authority as part of Britain’s war effort.

‘My sister Margaret-Rose and I feel so much for you’

Royal biographers and historians have tended to take for granted the roles played by George VI and Queen Elizabeth in supporting their people through the traumatic months of the Blitz. Scholars have interpreted the monarchs’ visits to bombed out areas of London and towns and cities in the provinces as epitomizing the class-levelling experience of the war, with the king and queen willingly sharing in the suffering created by the conflict.¹⁰⁷ Scenes of the monarchs stood with small gatherings of their subjects among the rubble of buildings flattened by the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids have become part of the popular canon of images associated with the British home front.¹⁰⁸ And, according to this narrative, it was through the experience of the Blitz that the king and queen came to ‘know their people and their people them’.¹⁰⁹ The famous words supposedly uttered by the queen after Buckingham Palace had been bombed – that she was ‘glad’ as it meant she could ‘now look the East End in the face’ (as an equal) – were almost certainly apocryphal, but they perfectly encapsulate the idea that the monarchs were united with their subjects in their suffering and resilience.

While the king and queen’s compassion for their subjects sprung from a genuine concern about their wellbeing, we must not lose sight of the way interactions between the monarchs and their subjects were carefully staged by royal officials and a compliant media to convey the impression of personal sympathy. The Blitz created a new and much-needed role for George VI and his consort at a time when their contribution to the war effort was being eclipsed by the fast-moving events of summer 1940. In adapting to the bombing raids, it is clear that the royal household sought to circumvent the influence of the Home Office and Ministry of Information in order to project a vision of a king and queen who were personally involved in the lives of their subjects, drawing on older forms of imagined intimacy between crown and people. Notably, the Blitz also signalled the start of a process that witnessed the monarchy become more assertive in terms of the leadership style it projected through its public relations strategy.

Official documents that detailed how Churchill’s government were preparing for air raids in August 1940 (the month before the Luftwaffe’s bombers began attacking Britain) also show how Buckingham Palace planned the royal visits to civil defence services that the king and queen had been undertaking across the UK since the start of the war. Importantly, these itineraries would act as the blueprint for the royal tours of blitzed areas from September 1940, with an emphasis firmly on informality and intimacy. Courtiers would liaise directly with the specific regional commissioner in charge of the civil defence service which the royals wanted to visit.¹¹⁰ Then, during the visit, ‘particular care is taken that the number of people presented [to the royals is] kept as small as possible and that … as little attention as possible is drawn to the visit. The opportunity is taken during the tour to present one or two individuals in an unostentatious manner, but anything in the nature of a number of formal presentations is taboo’.¹¹¹ Press arrangements for the royal civil defence service visits mirrored this emphasis on intimacy in the way they were kept to a minimum. Two specially accredited court reporters employed by two of the main news agencies – the Press Association and the Exchange Telegraph – accompanied the royal party, alongside two accredited photographers and a cameraman and producer from the newsreel company whose turn it was to film as part of the ‘royal rota’.¹¹²

There are three reasons which help to explain why the palace exercised such tight control over the planning and execution of royal visits during the war. First and foremost, it was crucial that the king and queen remained safe. At a time when there were grave concerns among British officials about the spreading of state secrets, the palace thought that the fewer people who knew about royal visits the less likely it was that something bad would happen to the king and queen during their excursions. Second, the royal tours were clearly designed to convey to select groups of onlookers and pressmen the personal connection that ostensibly linked the king and queen to their subjects. Presentations were to be informal: the monarchs would interact with ‘one or two individuals in an unostentatious manner’ and any kind of ceremony was discouraged in order to signal to those watching the intimate nature of the relationship between the royals and the public – as had been the case with provincial royal tours since George V’s early reign.¹¹³ Finally, by limiting the number of journalists and cameramen who accompanied the royal couple, courtiers were able to exercise tighter control over the way newspapers and newsreels projected the tours to media audiences. Documentary evidence in the Royal Archives is fragmentary but it seems that, in late 1937, courtiers decided that the House of Windsor would benefit from having accredited court reporters who would write about life at the palace and accompany members of the royal family on their public visits, thus gaining privileged access to royal news while acting as liaison with the rest of the media (similar measures had been put in place during the prince of Wales’s tours of the empire and Commonwealth in the 1920s).¹¹⁴ While we might conjecture that this move was intended to limit the number of journalists and photographers in constant pursuit of royalty, it also meant courtiers could better manage the media’s access to the House of Windsor, which was critical in the uncertain months after George VI’s coronation.

The Ministry of Home Security (which directed the civil defence services under the auspices of the Home Office) and the Ministry of Information were, to their annoyance, excluded from helping to co-ordinate royal tours during the war, but nevertheless had to deal with complaints from journalists in London and the provinces who were unable to come close to the royal visitors during their trips around Britain.¹¹⁵ These tensions came to a head at the start of the Blitz. J. H. Brebner, director of the Ministry of Information’s news division, wrote to T. B. Braund, a public relations officer at the Ministry of Home Security, in the hope that they could establish the protocol to be followed during royal visits of blitzed areas. Brebner wanted the Ministry of Home Security to inform the Ministry of Information’s news division about all royal tours so that he could dispatch a photographer to accompany the royal party. The main problem was that the police who managed access to the blitzed areas visited by royalty did not accept the press passes distributed by the Home Office and prevented non-accredited journalists, cameramen and photographers from gaining access to the royals.¹¹⁶ The Ministry of Information saw real benefits in having its own photographs of royal tours of blitzed areas which it could use as part of its propaganda campaigns and so it took up the matter directly with the palace. Two weeks later, civil servants at the Ministry of Home Security were able to confirm that press arrangements for royal visits were running much more smoothly: the royal household specified a list of news agencies, photographers and cameramen (as detailed above) to whom press passes were to be distributed; and the two accredited court reporters would cover the tours themselves and supervise any additional arrangements.¹¹⁷ However, this was not good enough for Brebner at the Ministry of Information, who was unhappy that the two news agencies accredited by the palace controlled all information about the royal tours; and he ‘strongly urge[d]’ civil servants at the Ministry of Home Security to ‘give the information to the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association’, who might then liaise with the press.¹¹⁸ Once again, the Ministry of Information revealed that in the early years of the war its propaganda aims did not align with those of the palace, which sought to maintain a tight grip over the royal media image through its relationship with accredited press agencies.

As the bombing raids over London persisted through October, and under increasing pressure from disgruntled reporters who were unhappy that they were not given access to report on the royal tours of blitzed areas in Britain’s towns and cities, F. N. Hillier from the Ministry of Home Security wrote to the king’s other assistant private secretary, Sir Eric Miéville, to ask if he might extend the list of pressmen who could accompany the royals on their excursions. Miéville replied that it was best to stick with ‘the existing plan’, although under exceptional circumstances, ‘by which I mean that when the visit is of particular importance’, the number might be increased.¹¹⁹ The palace thus stood firm in maintaining its authority over the media arrangements for the royal tours and, as far as one can tell from the historical evidence, this letter, written on 25 October 1940, signalled the end of the debate on this matter.¹²⁰

News reports, photographs and newsreel footage of the royal tours from late 1940 to the summer of 1941 exhibit a repetitive quality that is indicative of the formulaic press arrangements which went into staging the tours for media audiences. For example, in newsreels, scenes of the king and queen arriving at blitzed sites were accompanied by soundtracks of cheering and applause as the royals moved into close proximity to grinning members of the public (Figure 4.4). The cameras regularly focused in close-up on the waving and smiles of those who gathered to greet the royal visitors and a number of key figures were regularly singled out for special attention, including civil defence volunteers, air-raid precaution wardens, nurses and mothers with children. More often than not, commentators remarked on the reassuring smile and kind words of the queen and the camera regularly lingered on her as the emotional focal point that drew members of the public together. Commentaries also repeatedly stressed the ‘personal link’ that connected the monarchs to their subjects – rooted in the sympathy the royals expressed for their people and the courage and fortitude their visits supposedly inspired among the bereaved and those left homeless by the air raids.¹²¹

Figure 4.4. Royal visit to a bomb-damaged area of the East End, 23 April 1941 (RCIN 2000506). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

The royal household’s emphasis on intimacy and informality continued to shape how royal visits to blitzed areas were staged through the summer of 1941 and again in 1944/45 with the V1 and V2 rocket attacks.¹²² Regional commissioners of civil defence services remained the first point of contact for the palace. They instructed courtiers on the areas that had been bombed, helped to plan the royal visits to places of interest, including other special civil defence initiatives like feeding or rest centres, and were responsible for the smooth running of the tour. For example, the regional commissioner for London was the former Antarctic explorer, Admiral Sir Edward Evans, who accompanied the king and queen on many of their trips to blitzed areas in the capital.¹²³ Evans played a key role in liaising with the palace to ensure that royal tours took place promptly after air raids and that all areas were covered.¹²⁴

The tours also remained low-key affairs in terms of the way they were staged. Local dignitaries like district counsellors were deliberately excluded from itineraries and instead the royals focused their attention on the ordinary people who had endured the bombing raids.¹²⁵ Ostentatious garments like top hats were avoided at all times in order to convey to onlookers and reporters that the monarchs were ‘ordinary’ people, just like their subjects, and could empathize with the hardships of war.¹²⁶ Notably, the human touch that the queen mastered on these occasions became increasingly famous and mythologized, with the media and government officials regularly celebrating her role as the sympathetic focal point to which the suffering gravitated.¹²⁷

One reason why courtiers were so determined to control the media’s narrative on royal trips to blitzed communities was that the royal tourists did not always meet with a warm welcome. After the Luftwaffe’s first attacks on London’s East End in September 1940, it was rumoured in elite circles that the king and queen had been booed on visiting local inhabitants who had been bombed out of their homes.¹²⁸ The tours of blitzed areas, if not carefully managed, could therefore undermine the leadership role the monarchs sought to carve out for themselves in this period. The key event that enabled the king and queen to present themselves as fellow sufferers, and which supposedly helped to quell ill-feeling among working-class victims, was the bombing of Buckingham Palace on 8 September.¹²⁹ According to an intelligence report by the Ministry of Information, up until the announcement of this news inhabitants of the East End had been complaining that ‘it is always the poor that gets it’ [sic] (referring to air raids).¹³⁰ This awareness of popular disaffection created some anxiety among government officials who feared social unrest, but the bombing of the palace presented the Ministry of Information with an opportunity for ‘counteracting immediately the bad feeling in the East End’. The ministry contacted the royal household and arrangements were made for more than forty journalists from the British and foreign press to visit the palace grounds to see the bomb damage. As the ministry report continued: ‘The theme “King with His people in the front line together” was stressed with the journalists’. The official propaganda line of shared suffering complemented the earlier idea that the royal family and their subjects endured the hardships of war together – as first articulated by the queen in her radio broadcast of November 1939. Alan Lascelles recorded in a letter to his wife that the king and queen had been photographed among the ruins of their home and that he had been responsible for conducting journalists around the bomb site.¹³¹ It was certainly the case that the media toed the official line on the attack, with press reports stressing how the horrors of war on the home front united crown and people.¹³² The newsreels also drew on the refrain of shared suffering, Pathé News’s commentator remarking, for example, in a film of a later royal tour of blitzed Fulham, that, ‘having had their own home bombed, Their Majesties sp[oke] with understanding and sympathy [to their people]’.¹³³

The Ministry of Information judged that the media coverage of the bombing of the palace ‘immediately dissipated the bad feeling in the East End, led to remarkable expressions of affection for the Royal Family and aroused intense indignation throughout America’.¹³⁴ However, the Mass Observation evidence reveals a more complex picture. Investigators judged from the public responses recorded in the tea shop Lyons Corner House on Oxford Street that ‘the attitude was almost entirely one of acute interest and curiosity; no signs of dismay or anger’. Several people expressed a desire to see the damage for themselves, while others expressed annoyance at the privileges that separated the royals from the experiences of ordinary people. One twenty-five-year-old woman was recorded as saying it was better that the Luftwaffe attack Buckingham Palace ‘so they don’t bomb my home’. She continued: ‘It’s all right for these people; they can go somewhere else. It’s us working people can’t go anywhere else’.¹³⁵ Another exchange between two working-class women aged thirty captures some of the anger directed by poorer people at wealthier Londoners at the start of the Blitz:

And some people seemed to experience Schadenfreude. One Mass Observation investigator noted that she observed a twenty-year-old woman ‘calling to lorry men … hanging about at [the] side of [the] road: “They’ve bombed Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace is bombed!” She laughs excitedly the while, and the lorry men … laugh too’. As always, the Mass Observation evidence points to greater complexity in the feelings experienced and expressed by members of the public in relation to royalty. However, there were no more reports of the king and queen being booed during their visits after the first weeks of the Blitz, which might indicate that negative attitudes were indeed replaced by more positive ones.

The difficulty with which the historian has to contend in trying to gauge public opinion towards royalty in wartime is apathy. Indifference rarely makes itself heard in the archive and, given the constant hardships experienced by so many people during the conflict, one wonders to what extent they could really muster enthusiasm for the monarchy with everything else that was going on. One thing remains clear, however: the royal household and Ministry of Information actively sought to maintain the narrative of shared suffering. In spring 1942 the king and queen took a twenty-two roomed flat in Mayfair in order to free up some of their staff at a time when there was a national labour shortage and it was agreed with the War Office that the government would foot the bill for the renovation of the building. The Sunday Pictorial learnt about this and of the extravagant silver fittings that would feature in the newly refurbished space and prepared a report on it but, before the story could go to press, it was submitted to the censor who ‘turned [it] down flat’, knowing full well that it would undermine the official narrative of equality of sacrifice.¹³⁶

*

The image of the House of Windsor suffering alongside their subjects on the home front was also promoted by a number of other institutions, most notably by that now longstanding champion of the crown, the BBC. In September 1940 the broadcaster worked with courtiers to plan Princess Elizabeth’s first radio message to listeners in Britain and the English-speaking world. It is significant that the BBC did not involve the Ministry of Information in the royal broadcast but instead went straight to the palace with its idea, a decision that is indicative of the fractious relationship that developed between the broadcaster and the ministry in the first years of the war, with the latter often meddling in the BBC’s output.¹³⁷ The broadcaster also had its own agenda in inviting the princess to speak. The idea originated with the director of children’s hour, Derek ‘Uncle Mac’ McCulloch, who wanted her to inaugurate a special ‘Children in Wartime’ radio series due to begin in mid October. To this the director of outside broadcasts, Seymour Joly de Lotbinière, added that he thought the message could also inaugurate the BBC’s new North American children’s hour to be broadcast to evacuees overseas and specifically those who had been sent to the USA and Canada.¹³⁸ De Lotbinière suggested that ‘the occasion would warrant a keen effort to “square” the Palace’ (meaning to bring them on side), but thought that combining the two occasions would strengthen the BBC’s arguments in support of its idea. It was left to the director general, Sir Frederick Ogilvie, to write to Alexander Hardinge to make the case for the princess’s message. He noted that:

Historians have noted that Princess Elizabeth’s message was designed to influence adult opinion in the USA at a time when Churchill’s government hoped America would unite with Britain and its allies against the Axis powers.¹⁴⁰ To this end, Ogilvie’s words clearly reveal that the BBC sought to support this ‘national cause’ through the broadcast. But the historical focus on the US dimension has obscured the monarchy’s own urgent need to re-establish its authority in the crisis months of autumn 1940.

The significance of the innovation of having a royal child broadcast can be fully appreciated when it is considered against previous requests for similar messages. Throughout the 1930s wireless listeners had written to Buckingham Palace asking to hear other family members of the king speak to them over the airwaves. One of these listeners was T. E. Hartnoll of Cape Town, South Africa, who wrote to George V in November 1934:

There are other letters like this one in the archives which reveal that new kinds of media exposure fostered a curiosity among sections of the public about the voices of Britain’s royal personalities. Indeed, the BBC had long seen the value in broadcasting a range of royal voices and had asked courtiers whether other members of the royal family – including Queen Mary – could deliver messages.¹⁴² However, these requests were always rebuffed by the royal household – that is, until the exigencies of war had brought in to question the leadership offered by the House of Windsor. Before this, George VI had spoken for his family; if other royals had made broadcasts they might have undermined his personal authority. Equally, as we have seen from Queen Elizabeth’s private correspondence, there were concerns at the palace that other public messages might appear too informal in tone.

Once the king and queen had agreed to the princess’s broadcast, Ogilvie handed over responsibility for the preparations to the BBC’s new deputy director general, Stephen Tallents, a public relations expert who had previously worked on the campaigns of the General Post Office film unit and, before that, the Empire Marketing Board. Tallents knew full well that publicity worked better when driven by a ‘human-interest’ storyline and, in overseeing the drafting of the royal message, included a reference to the family separation the princess had endured along with other children in Britain.¹⁴³ By the autumn of 1940 Elizabeth and her sister Margaret were living at Windsor Castle, where the king and queen also spent their nights. In what was thus a misleading phrase, the BBC’s first draft of the speech had the princess telling child listeners that, ‘like you, my sister and I are living away from our parents, and we too try to realise that it is our duty to share some of the partings and hardships which fall to the lot of children in wartime’.¹⁴⁴ This image of wartime dislocation remained at the core of subsequent drafts of the broadcast and found its way into the final version spoken by the princess. Of course, the BBC maintained strict secrecy as to the actual location of the princesses lest their whereabouts be made public, which would not only have endangered them but also have undermined the narrative of royal family separation.¹⁴⁵

Once again, the king’s assistant private secretary, Alan Lascelles, was responsible for preparing the final draft of the princess’s radio message. On 5 October Tallents wrote to him enclosing the BBC’s latest effort and remarked that he knew the courtier was ‘anxious to have a draft as soon as possible … [W]e hope that this may at least give you something to work upon’. Tallents also noted in relation to the BBC’s draft that:

Tallents’s advocacy here was important because Princess Margaret did go on to say farewell at the end of her elder sister’s broadcast. Clearly, Lascelles also detected value in including it and, as we shall see, he was right to: the younger princess’s contribution caught some listeners off guard, delighting them in its apparent spontaneity.

In Lascelles’s trusted hands, the focus of Princess Elizabeth’s message became how she and her sister shared in the emotional burdens of war and empathized with the children who had been evacuated overseas. When she came to broadcast on the evening of Sunday 13 October, the princess told her listeners that:

Lascelles thus carefully avoided any suggestion that the princesses were still separated from the king and queen, should the royal deception be discovered. All references to the new ‘Children in Wartime’ series contained in earlier drafts were removed by the courtier, who instead focused the message on the shared emotional economy which linked the princesses to other children. The affective dimensions of the message extended to the optimism expressed by Elizabeth about the future: ‘[W]hen peace comes … it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place’. These lines, which alluded to an improved post-war world, concealed official concerns about the severe class tensions that affected Britain in late 1940 and demonstrate that Lascelles hoped to convey to listeners that the princesses, as young girls, shared the discomfort of other children but equally symbolized a more positive future. Elizabeth then ended by telling listeners that ‘my sister is by my side and we are both going to say good night to you. Come on, Margaret’. At this point the younger princess chimed in with ‘Good night children’, followed by Elizabeth’s final words: ‘Good night and good luck to you all’.

What did listeners make of the princess’s broadcast? The BBC interpreted it as a propaganda triumph and reported back to the palace the ecstatic reception with which it had been received on the other side of the Atlantic.¹⁴⁸ Four Mass Observation investigators, each tasked with conducting interviews with people they encountered in different parts of London – including Streatham, Notting Hill Gate, Knightsbridge and Fulham – reported a more complex picture. They asked passers-by whether or not they had heard the princess’s broadcast and, if so, what they thought of it.¹⁴⁹ The compilers of the resulting Mass Observation report noted that interviews of this kind shaped how respondents replied: ‘[T]his is the sort of question of which it is strongly socially done to say that Royalty was right’.¹⁵⁰ However, despite the problematic line of questioning, which may have suppressed interviewees’ true thoughts and feelings, and the geographical limitations of the study, the replies of respondents are illuminating.

Out of a total number of fifty-seven people who were asked the questions, thirty-eight reported that they had listened to the princess’s broadcast. Elizabeth had spoken at a time in the week designed to reach as many listeners as possible, which may help to explain why so many people reported hearing it.¹⁵¹ There were three recurring themes to their responses. First, more than twenty of those who listened to the broadcast commented positively on how they thought it ‘charming’, ‘sweet’, ‘beautiful’, ‘lovely’ or that the princess ‘spoke well’ or ‘was wonderful’.¹⁵² Women tended to be more lavish in their praise than men – again revealing that it was more socially acceptable for women to express their feelings in public in this period – and several respondents described in detail the princess’s diction and emotions. For example:

Comments like these suggest that listeners focused intently on the princess’s voice, some detecting a certain nervousness, which again shows that radio created a powerful empathetic interface between royal speakers and media audiences. The second theme that linked the Mass Observation responses was the way the princess’s broadcast evoked comparisons with her mother or references to her younger sister, who, as we have seen, spoke at the end of the message:

Comments like these indicate that the broadcast awakened in some listeners imagined connections with a larger royal family group and a desire to link the princess to her mother in order to better relate to her. Meanwhile, the comments on the princess’s reference to her sister suggest that some listeners welcomed its seemingly informal tone but, as we know, it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, the third recurring theme that linked a dozen of the interviewees’ responses was a criticism of the speech that sprung from a suspicion that ulterior motives lay behind it. Most stated that they did not think it was written by the princess but rather by someone else:

On the one hand, the criticism levelled at the princess’s broadcast points to the fact that some members of the public thought the royal family usually were the authors of their own speeches, which is suggestive of the way that sincerity and trust underpinned the emotional bonds between British subjects and the crown. This trust seems to have been threatened by the public’s growing sensitivity to, and disaffection with, official wartime propaganda, which were also revealed by the Mass Observation survey.¹⁵³ Notably, the working-class men who criticized that the broadcast was just ‘done for the business’ and was ‘only to keep the population quiet’ indicated that their distrust extended to the work that went into projecting the monarchy’s media image.

Other Mass Observation evidence broadly tallied with the London interviews, although some diarists took issue with the way the princess ‘told us how she had experienced the same as the refugee children’.¹⁵⁴ The official Mass Observation report on the broadcast that resulted from the interviews was over-negative given that most who responded tended to do so positively; and this probably has more to do with the alarmist tone that characterized Mass Observation’s crusading work in the crisis months of autumn 1940 than with any reality. The one comment that investigators singled out to illustrate this negative sentiment is, however, very revealing in what it tells us about how some members of the public perceived the princess. It came from a letter written to Mass Observation by a patient in a hospital:

For this listener, the broadcast failed to meet expectations. Specifically, it did nothing to enhance the fairy-tale quality of the princess’s image, which the hospital patient thought was so intrinsic to the way Elizabeth was perceived, but rather conveyed what the listener thought were banal political platitudes that would have little impact on the public. Clearly, Stephen Tallents’s and Alan Lascelles’s efforts were lost on some people.

Figure 4.5. Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret at the microphone, by a photographer from The Times (RCIN 2002152). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

The director of children’s hour, Derek McCulloch, judged the broadcast a great success, and wrote to Lascelles asking that he pass on his gratitude to the princesses and to enquire whether they could sign copies of the pictures taken by a photographer from The Times to publicize the broadcast (Figure 4.5).¹⁵⁶ In fact, most leading newspapers used these pictures in their coverage of the message, which was, needless to say, extremely positive and highlighted its personal elements – including the shared hardships that connected the princesses to other children and Elizabeth’s likeness to her mother.¹⁵⁷ The photographs also featured as stills in newsreel reproductions of the princess’s speech and, as with the queen’s 1939 broadcast, Pathé and Movietone imposed scenes of British children waving goodbye to their parents at train-station platforms and arriving in the countryside where they were to be billeted.¹⁵⁸ The message communicated through the newsreel coverage of the princess’s broadcast when she could be heard telling viewers she and her sister knew what it felt like to be separated from one’s parents was, once again, that the royal children were no different to other evacuees and thus symbolic of their generation.

Figure 4.6. Marcus Adams, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, 9 April 1940 (RCIN 2943730). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

Figure 4.7. ‘Princess Elizabeth: Fourteen Next Sunday’, Daily Express, 17 April 1940, p. 3, with photograph by Marcus Adams. © The British Library Board.

Figure 4.8. ‘The Princesses Grow Up’, Daily Mirror, 24 April 1941, p. 5, with photograph by Marcus Adams. © The British Library Board

The image of the princesses as normal children was highlighted by the clothes they wore in photographs like the ones taken to publicize Elizabeth’s broadcast in 1940. Both were dressed in matching jackets and striped jumpers – fairly ordinary-looking clothes and a far cry from the fairy-tale dresses in which they and their mother had posed for photographer Cecil Beaton before the war. Historians have argued that he played an important part in making royal femininity appear more ordinary through his wartime pictures of the princesses.¹⁵⁹ In fact, another photographer, Marcus Adams, was responsible for most of the portraits of Elizabeth and Margaret between 1939 and 1945 and helped to popularize the more austere iconography of the royal children in wartime (Figures 4.6, 4.7., 4.8).¹⁶⁰

It is significant that apart from Elizabeth’s broadcast in 1940, neither she nor her sister featured prominently as part of royal publicity in the first three years of the war. Given that they were still young, it was much easier to cast them as virtuous victims of wartime family separation than to present them as enthusiastic participants in the fight against Nazism. However, royal portraits of the princesses were commissioned every year to coincide with their birthdays. In the first three years of the war the pictorial emphasis was firmly on the girls’ apparent loneliness. Elizabeth and Margaret usually posed sitting or standing together; other royals, like their mother, did not tend to feature in these images and this worked to highlight the fact that they were – to all intents and purposes – separated from their parents.¹⁶¹ When the queen did feature, as was the case with one of Elizabeth’s birthday portraits taken in 1941, the media’s emphasis was on a fleeting family reunion and the love of a mother for her children.¹⁶² Only later on in the war, once the princess had turned sixteen and had begun to assume a public role, and only once the threat of air attack and invasion had receded, did the royal family group begin regularly to reappear in media photographs together: it was no longer necessary to keep up the pretence of a dynasty dislocated by evacuation.¹⁶³

On her turning sixteen on 21 April 1942, Elizabeth’s public image changed almost overnight from that of a child to a young royal woman with duties and responsibilities much like her older relatives.¹⁶⁴ On the morning of her birthday, dressed like her mother in coat and floppy hat, she undertook her first inspection of a military regiment as part of a special parade at Windsor castle. The regiment were the Grenadier Guards and the princess took on an honorary role as their new colonel.¹⁶⁵ Her uncle Edward had served as a lieutenant of the Grenadiers during the First World War and, in so doing, had become the symbolic ‘soldier prince’, his service on the Western Front ensuring he came to embody the cultures of duty and sacrifice which defined the generation of men who fought in the trenches.¹⁶⁶ Now, the princess was projected as a symbol of her own youthful generation through her service as part of another war. She, too, wore uniform: first of all, as a sea ranger (an offshoot of the girl guides) and, from February 1945, as an auxiliary territorial service driver and mechanic. The media naturally helped to promote the image of an heir to the throne who, like her uncle Edward before her, seemed to be mucking in as part of the war effort.¹⁶⁷ However, by this point, the Second World War was nearing its end and we should thus interpret the media’s coverage of the princess’s ATS activities as forming part of a larger campaign that had been underway since 1943 to mythologize the monarchy’s wartime leadership.

‘We women as home-makers have a great part to play’

On 25 December 1942 George VI told those who tuned in to listen to his annual broadcast that ‘it is at Christmas more than at any other time that we are conscious of the dark shadow of war’. He continued: ‘Our Christmas festival today must lack many of the happy familiar features that it has had from our earliest childhood; we miss the actual presence of some of those nearest and dearest, without whom our family gathering cannot be complete’. Four months earlier the monarch’s youngest brother, Prince George, duke of Kent, had been killed during a flying mission with the RAF, which demonstrated that the emotional trauma of wartime bereavement extended to the House of Windsor as well as other British families – a theme the king directly addressed in his Christmas message:

With these words, the king described how the experiences of war had generated a greater affinity among the different sections of British society, including between public and royalty. Some listeners seem to have appreciated his sentiments, too. One female Mass Observation diarist recorded in relation to the message that ‘[George VI] is, alas, now one with those who mourn someone near and dear in the loss of the Duke of Kent this year’.¹⁶⁹ The king also used the 1942 Christmas broadcast to signal that the monarchy’s sights were now set firmly on what would come after the war had ended. Despite the difficulties many men, women and children across the world continued to face because of the conflict, his speech was defined by an optimism and confidence about the future that had not been present in his previous wartime Christmas messages. A year earlier the USA had joined the allied war effort and helped to tip the balance of military might against the Axis powers.¹⁷⁰ The crisis months of the Blitz seemed a long way off and, as Lascelles noted in his diary, British politicians were starting to turn their attention to post-war reconstruction and the question of what the Allies would do with a defeated Nazi Germany.¹⁷¹

In his Christmas broadcast George VI also spoke at length about recent allied military successes and the continued efforts of men and women on the home front in war production. It was in these two spheres that he and his consort now sought to cement their legacies as wartime leaders, the queen through her support and promotion of British women’s work in factories, fields, the auxiliary services and their homes; the king through his association with national and imperial military triumphs and his ties to non-combatant men back on the home front. The gendered division that characterized the royal couple’s media strategy after 1942 mirrored the kinds of public role they had carved out for themselves since the war began. The queen maintained her sympathetic public image, having regularly expressed pity for ordinary people, especially women, affected by the conflict. The king, while less effusive with his emotions, nevertheless proved determined to consolidate a public image as a war leader that was rooted in a more direct kind of relationship between monarch and subjects. The House of Windsor’s publicity strategy in the period from the spring of 1943 through to May 1945 was therefore designed to strengthen a narrative of royal leadership in wartime that would come to underpin the monarchy’s reputation after the conflict had ended. These years witnessed a shift left in the nation’s political mood, with the war demonstrating how government could play a more active role in organizing the lives of civilians. The Beveridge Report, published in November 1942, encapsulated this new awareness of the population’s needs in its recommendations for new kinds of social insurance and state welfare, many of which were welcomed by the public at the time and later implemented by Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government.¹⁷² Despite continued public criticism of the privileges enjoyed by the royal family in the later years of the war, the palace sought to maintain the idea of shared experience in order to appeal to the increasingly egalitarian mood while at the same time elevating a vision of a post-war world that was centred on a popular family monarchy.

Although the sudden loss of the duke of Kent was a personal tragedy for the House of Windsor, it presented journalists with the perfect opportunity to highlight the mutual sacrifices of war that seemed to unite crown and people. With one voice, newspapers and newsreels celebrated Prince George’s public service and emphasized that his death had demonstrated that no section of society was immune to wartime bereavement, focusing in particular on the grieving figures of his wife, Princess Marina, and three young children through the reproduction of large front-page photographs (Figure 4.9).¹⁷³ However, the public reaction to his death recorded by Mass Observation suggests that the monarchy had some work to do if it was to convince the population that royalty shared evenly in the hardships of the conflict with the rest of the nation. For several diarists and a number of those people who were asked about the duke for a special Mass Observation file report, the belief persisted that the House of Windsor was very different from other British families. While on the one hand respondents described the duke as just another casualty of war (signalling the class-levelling experience of wartime bereavement), they often added that his wife and children would not suffer the same material hardships as other families who had lost loved ones to the fighting. The words of a forty-year-old clerk and housewife from Sheffield in Yorkshire capture this kind of double-edged response:

This personal testimony reveals that people could feel sympathy for the relatives of the dead (in this case Queen Mary, Marina and her children) while at the same time expressing frustration at the way the House of Windsor was better placed to cope with the prince’s death than other families because of their privileged circumstances. The respondent condescendingly expressed her annoyance at the way the so-called ‘ignorant’ failed to appreciate the differences that separated royal life from the experiences of ordinary people, indicating her deeper awareness of the royal public relations strategy that stressed mutual suffering. Other respondents expressed similar kinds of sympathy for Queen Mary and Marina and were probably inspired to do so by the media coverage of the prince’s death, which focused on the sorrow of both women and the way they shared in the emotional burdens of war.¹⁷⁵

One thirty-nine-year-old diarist from Glasgow notably took exception to the criticism levelled by other people at royal privilege. She noted that:

This diary entry reveals the enduring popularity of Queen Mary as the recipient of public sympathy but also that there was a regularity to the ‘envious’ remarks purportedly levelled at the monarchy in these years. This may point to the way a deeper disaffection with royal privilege had gained traction during the war.¹⁷⁷ Of course, Mass Observation naturally uncovered opinions that ran counter to this idea as well. A forty-five-year-old man quoted in the file report on the duke’s death told the interviewer: ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a better Royal Family – the King and Queen have been with us in all the bad blitzes, even though they could very well have hidden themselves in the country – they’re one of us’.¹⁷⁸ For this man, the royal tours of blitzed areas had engendered his loyalty to the House of Windsor. And, despite the cynicism articulated by several respondents, Mass Observation investigators concluded that ‘the chief reaction was that [the duke’s death] showed how this war was the same for everyone, even the Royal Family. Probably the death of the Duke of Kent has done more for the popularity of the Royal Family than any other single event could have done’. While this was a simplified rendering of the varied opinions recorded by Mass Observation, the one factor that linked many of the responses was an appreciation that wartime bereavement affected all sections of society, even if some families were in better positions to cope with this loss than others.

Figure 4.9. ‘The Duke of Kent Killed’, Daily Sketch, 26 August 1942, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

*

Queen Elizabeth spoke of the far-reaching consequences of the war for the female population in the second broadcast she delivered to Britain’s women in April 1943. In so doing, she presented herself as their leader and someone to whom they could all relate. The plans for this message were not instigated by the queen, but rather pressure was brought to bear on her by government officials who saw value in another royal broadcast. In December 1941 the government instituted the National Service (No. 2) Act, which mobilized British women into new kinds of war work on an unprecedented scale.¹⁷⁹ Some women enjoyed the new opportunities that opened up for them as a result of employment, while others did not, instead resenting that they had to combine their domestic roles with part-time paid work or had to leave their homes altogether following conscription into ‘essential’ industries in other parts of the UK.¹⁸⁰ The size of the female workforce peaked in 1943 after the government had introduced new forms of compulsion the previous year, witnessing an increase in the number of women who had to balance war work with domestic responsibilities.¹⁸¹ The minister for labour, Ernest Bevin, was anxious about maintaining morale among disaffected female conscripts and his desire to have their contribution to the war effort formally recognized led to his proposal to Buckingham Palace that the queen broadcast a message of encouragement and gratitude to women who were engaged in work outside the home.¹⁸² As was usually the case with special royal broadcasts, the road to convincing the palace of its value was a difficult one. Bevin first wrote to Alexander Hardinge at the start of December 1942, but four months before this the Ministry of Information had contacted the king’s private secretary, suggesting that the queen deliver a special message to British housewives. The idea had first come from the BBC and the Ministry of Information was in agreement that housewives had ‘a great deal to put up with that is both irritating and tiring in the normal conduct of their lives’ and that ‘a public appreciation of their efforts … would stimulate and encourage them to carry on during the coming winter’.¹⁸³ Hardinge replied doubtfully (although tellingly, in terms of his attitudes to innovation): ‘My personal view on broadcasts by The King and Queen is that they should be reserved for special occasions. Admittedly the housewives of this country are having a difficult and somewhat wearing time. It may, however, become considerably more difficult and wearing if the Germans resume their intensive bombing of our large towns’.¹⁸⁴ Although Hardinge responded negatively, the queen was consulted on the idea of another broadcast and she composed a handwritten message to the courtier in mid August informing him that she ‘might think of making a broadcast to women in the late autumn or early winter, but not to any section in particular. The housewife would naturally be included’.¹⁸⁵ This is significant because Queen Elizabeth seems to have seen in the broadcast an opportunity to lay claim to representation of all British women, not just housewives, and in so doing to convey to them her own understanding of the requirements of womanhood in wartime.

The minister of labour’s approach came next. Stating that he also wrote on behalf of the minister of information, Brendan Bracken, and the minister of production, Oliver Lyttelton, Bevin argued that a royal message ‘of appreciation and cheer’ to the ‘women of this country … whether they have been engaged in factories, in the Services, or in the work of the home … would be very encouraging to them’.¹⁸⁶ Bevin had befriended the king and Hardinge earlier on in the war and his appeal seems to have struck a chord.¹⁸⁷ When the private secretary came to reply to the minister he noted that the king and queen had ‘renewed [their] consideration’ of the proposed broadcast and that ‘the idea … [they] are contemplating now, is that Her Majesty might do the kind of broadcast that you suggest in February. That is, as a rule, a particularly unpleasant time of the year; and perhaps an expression of gratitude and encouragement then would be especially effective’.¹⁸⁸ Clearly the palace wanted the broadcast to have as great an impact as possible given the difficult winter they thought lay ahead. Bevin continued to apply pressure on the royal household and tried to convince them that the message would be better received if it was delivered as part of a New Year’s greeting. But the palace stood firm on the proposed date of a Sunday in February, asserting that the king thought a New Year’s address would follow too soon after his own Christmas message.¹⁸⁹ And, in actual fact, after further deliberations the date for the queen’s broadcast was pushed back to mid April: she would speak when, and only when, she was ready to speak.¹⁹⁰

Having been reassured by the palace that the broadcast would definitely go ahead, Bevin set about making arrangements to ensure the widest possible female audience for the queen’s message. The Ministry of Information and BBC instructed him that the optimum time for its transmission would be 9 pm on a Sunday evening but Bevin complained in a letter to Hardinge that even then ‘a great many of the women to whom the proposed message would be addressed would be unable to listen to it’. He therefore suggested that a film be made of the queen while she was broadcasting, which would ‘enable Her Majesty’s message to reach women in the factories, the Services, and throughout the Empire, who might not otherwise hear it’. ¹⁹¹ The queen declined Bevin’s invitation to have her actual broadcast filmed – no doubt out of fear that something could go wrong during the live transmission – but she agreed to a ‘special sitting’ for a separate film recording that could be shown as part of newsreels.¹⁹² This was organized by Bracken and the Ministry of Information’s film division, which worked with British Paramount News (the company appointed according to the royal rota) to record a version of the broadcast to be used by the newsreels. The palace notably insisted that it retain ultimate control over the film, with courtier Eric Miéville instructing Paramount that ‘should the pictures not be considered satisfactory by The Queen, they will not be shown’.¹⁹³

It appears from internal palace memoranda that some members of the royal household were unhappy about the pressure being brought to bear on the queen by Bevin. After Bracken took over at the Ministry of Information in 1942, it relaxed the control it had previously sought to exert over institutions like the BBC and the monarchy, instead enabling them to pursue their own propaganda objectives. But now courtiers had to deal with a stubborn minister for labour who had his own specific agenda to promote. Lascelles told Hardinge the queen hoped that, once the final date for the broadcast had been settled, ‘the Ministry of Labour [would] fade out of the picture’.¹⁹⁴ Once again, then, it seems that while the royal family were quite prepared to support the government’s aims during the war, they preferred to do so on their own terms and resisted ministerial interference in royal public relations. Nevertheless, Bevin was a useful ally to the palace given his extensive knowledge of the work that women were undertaking as part of the war effort and Hardinge thought ‘it would be both politic and appreciated’ to ask him whether there were any ‘special points’ worth including in the queen’s broadcast.¹⁹⁵ The minister replied with a list of notes that highlighted what women working in different roles stood both to gain and to lose as a result of their occupations. For example, in relation to the ‘Women in the Services’, he noted positives that included ‘companionship, [their] direct contribution to the war, “seeing the world”’ and negatives such as ‘separation from families, communal living and discipline’. He compiled this kind of Ciceronian decomposition for civil defence workers, factory workers, nurses, housewives, women in the country and the women’s land army. And in line with the government’s policy of encouraging more women to take on responsibilities outside the home in this period, Bevin included two additional points ‘which at the present stage of mobilization of women power it is important to us to stress’. These were that Queen Elizabeth might address ‘the continued and still more pressing need for those women who can to be willing to leave their homes and go to the big centres of war production’ and that there was a ‘need for married women to take over the work which these women leave behind, dull and uninteresting and far removed from the war as it may seem’.¹⁹⁶

The final version of the queen’s speech did not include a direct appeal to female listeners to take on additional work – probably because the monarch would be heard overtly espousing government policy through such exhortation. The royal public relations strategy was subtler than this and the palace sought to distance royal public language from official propaganda. Nevertheless, the queen did refer to all the different occupations that women were employed in according to Bevin’s list, which suggests that, in preparing the message, Lascelles and his collaborators may have taken some of their cues from the minister of labour.¹⁹⁷ The other contributors to the broadcast were Edward Woods (bishop of Lichfield and successor to Cosmo Lang as lord high almoner in the royal household) and Winston Churchill.¹⁹⁸ Exactly what these two contributed is unclear from the many drafts contained in the Royal Archives, but the final result was a wide-ranging broadcast that went further than any previous royal message in stressing the personal bonds that connected a member of the House of Windsor to the public while also outlining a vision of a future Britain centred on the family monarchy. That neither the Ministry of Information nor the BBC played any part in the drafting process is also revealing of the fact that, by 1943, the palace had managed to wrest back control over royal speech-writing in order to circumvent outside interference.

The tone of the message was particularly intimate. The words spoken by the queen and the highly informal imagery she conjured as she delivered the broadcast set a new precedent for royal public language. She began by directly addressing female listeners:

Annotations on the final draft of the message are in Lascelles’s handwriting and, through deliberate underlining (as above), instructed the queen to place emphasis on personal pronouns such as ‘you’, ‘your’ and ‘our’ in order to stress to listeners both her personal connection to them and also the shared experience of war.¹⁹⁹ The queen went on to describe the ‘quiet heroism’ of the women who had engaged, supposedly uncomplainingly, in war work. The image of a female workforce stoically serving the nation echoed government propaganda and the popular idea that all members of society were doing their bit to win the ‘people’s war’.²⁰⁰ The disaffection that caused Bevin so much concern was marginalized: instead, the queen described how women workers were keeping cheerful despite sometimes physically hard or dangerous jobs. She remarked that she admired the ‘pluck’ of the women workers whom she had encountered during her tours of the nation and that she had ‘heard them say, “Oh, well, it’s not much. I’m just doing my best to help us win the war”’. This self-deprecating image of the Englishwoman resonated with older ideas of the national character which were also captured in the queen’s comment that the courage of women workers was reinforced ‘by one of the strongest weapons in our national Armory – a sense of humour that nothing can daunt’.²⁰¹

The queen then went on to address, indirectly, all the different female groups listed by Bevin that were engaged in war work, emphasizing that it was ‘just as valuable’ as ‘that which is done by the bravest soldier, sailor, or airman who actually meets the enemy in battle’. She continued:

This passage was the core of the broadcast through which the queen described the varied experiences of British women in wartime to listeners, but simultaneously stressed that she and they were committed to winning the war, having endured its hardships together. As with her husband’s message on Christmas Day 1942, the queen then drew her broadcast to a close by projecting an optimistic vision of post-war reconstruction that focused on pre-war imagery of a nation united by its domesticity:

At a time when the government was worried about the impact of adultery on the home front and the damage it could do to fighting men’s spirits, the queen’s instruction to women to stay true to their husbands was meant to resonate with listeners, but not everyone reacted positively.²⁰² One Mass Observation diarist recorded that she and her companions ‘were most amused at [the queen’s] reference to the duty of wives to be faithful to their husbands overseas – it must be serious or she certainly wouldn’t have referred to it’.²⁰³ The other moral message contained in the last segment of the broadcast was that the rebuilding of family life would lead to national renewal, with the monarch encouraging women to set an example after war had ended. As the queen’s biographer has noted, she was socially and politically conservative and believed that women should step down from their wartime jobs when peace arrived.²⁰⁴ Her message thus sought to resolve one of the major tensions at the heart of government policy towards women in wartime: namely, whether work outside the domestic sphere should take precedence over home-making. In the queen’s message, both kinds of work were celebrated as having equal value, the queen (and her speechwriters) striking a balance in appealing to different female constituencies. And yet, the monarch presented work outside the domestic sphere as temporary and something that would inevitably come to an end for women when the war was over. The queen advocated a return to the kind of family life promoted by the monarchy before the war, underpinned as it was by a faith in God that would ‘help us to carry the moral responsibilities which history is placing upon our shoulders’. And, in addition to this familiar reference to the need for divine guidance, she ended her message by returning to the well-worn idea of the burdens of royal duty by remarking that ‘the King and I are grateful to think that we and our family are remembered in your prayers. We need them and try to live up to them’.

Although the aforementioned Mass Observation diarist and her friends found the queen’s reference to marital infidelity amusing, most of those who recorded hearing the broadcast stated they were impressed by the moral substance of the message. The same housewife and clerk from Sheffield who had criticized ‘the ignorant’ for pitying royalty at the time of the duke of Kent’s death recorded that the queen’s broadcast was ‘very pleasing’ and that she was ‘glad [the monarch] put emphasis on the need for [a] spiritual outlook’. This diarist also appreciated the apparently impromptu qualities of the message: ‘Nice that she spoke to us just because she felt she wanted to, and for no particular reason’.²⁰⁵ A thirty-three-year-old restaurant owner from Edinburgh agreed:

For this woman, the broadcast reaffirmed her belief in the whole concept of monarchy and she detected an emotion in the queen’s voice that only added to the authenticity of the message. A fifty-four-year-old teacher from Surrey felt similarly inspired. He described how the monarch spoke with ‘a clean and very sympathetic voice, very attractive to listen to’ (here possibly implying that George VI’s voice was anything but easy to listen to). He went on: ‘The Queen’s charm is so particularly within her. I have a great admiration for them both [referring to the king too] … this is built upon respect and, in a way, gratitude I think’.²⁰⁷ He then described his ‘moral respect’ for the monarchs, the broadcast having strengthened his appreciation of the example set by the royal family to the nation. A fifty-six-year-old nurse from Bristol also shared in this outlook, writing in her diary that ‘the Queen’s broadcast to women must have comforted and inspired thousands’.²⁰⁸

Not everyone agreed. A forty-three-year-old teacher from Sussex recorded that while she thought the speech ‘pleasant tho’ over-religious’ the head of her school ‘thought it awful – so gloomy. How lacking in vigour & dynamism compared with Churchill’. She recorded that her colleagues ‘[had] started making fun of it early on, then got the giggles. She is really good at the “be active & efficient” line, stand up for women’s rights etc. But that wd. be no good if one of the family were e.g. killed in the war & the Queen was speaking to many who are anxious, sad etc. A very big number of Sussex men are prisoners’.²⁰⁹ Not everyone, therefore, believed the queen’s words to be sincere. The teacher noted that her colleagues thought the appeal to women workers was just a propaganda ‘line’ and did not think the encouragement offered by the monarch would resonate with listeners who had lost loved ones to the war or those who had family members interred in prisoner-of-war camps.

In reporting the broadcast, newspapers again drew attention to the queen’s interest in the lives of her female subjects. According to the Daily Sketch, she ‘made the broadcast at her suggestion, largely as a result … of the experiences she has had seeing women at war work in all parts of the country’.²¹⁰ Reports like this one misleadingly asserted that the monarch was the instigator of the message, which consolidated her public image as the leader of Britain’s women who wanted to acknowledge their important contribution to the war effort. The other main theme the press emphasized was Queen Elizabeth’s reference to the importance of domesticity to post-war reconstruction, thus reiterating her view that women would leave their wartime jobs in favour of home when the conflict finally ended.²¹¹ Meanwhile, the newsreels that used footage from the film recording of the queen’s broadcast (which, incidentally, passed palace inspection) interspersed scenes of her speaking from behind a desk with stock footage of women from across Britain engaged in various types of war work, which included the auxiliary services, factory work and housewifery.²¹² As with the newsreels of earlier royal wartime broadcasts, the words of the speaker were contextualized by reference to scenes of the way in which the war had transformed the lives of the public, with the visual illustration creating a direct link between the words spoken by royalty and ordinary people’s experiences, reaffirming a vision of the House of Windsor’s national leadership in wartime.

*

While Queen Elizabeth promoted a vision of the nation’s future that was family-centred and mirrored the kind of domesticity the British monarchy had publicly elevated in the 1930s, George VI and his advisors proved determined that he should be seen as the man who had led the nation and the empire to victory over their enemies. Since May 1940 he had faced stiff competition from his prime minister, Winston Churchill, whose command of the mass media and often inspiring rhetoric won him popular acclaim among sections of the public.²¹³ Although a number of commentators observed a strengthening in George VI’s character and style of leadership during the war, Churchill projected a ‘forceful and visceral personality’ which the king could never hope to imitate with his stammer. As an anti-appeaser, Churchill had been marginalized from frontline politics in the 1930s, but his leadership during the crisis years of 1940/41 restored what historian Martin Francis has termed his ‘militaristic and imperial vision of national identity to the foreground of official discourse’.²¹⁴

Churchill could be extravagantly courteous to his royal superiors but often kept government secrets hidden from the king, which annoyed the latter. Furthermore, the prime minister regularly disregarded royal protocol in political affairs. For example, he liked to send off congratulatory messages to British and imperial military officials when this was very much the prerogative of the king.²¹⁵ As Lascelles noted in his diary, the effect of this misconduct was a growth in what he termed the ‘silly talk’ that ‘Winston [was] trying to steal the King’s thunder, or (to use a more homely metaphor) to push the Crown under the bed’.²¹⁶ The private secretary downplayed the ‘silly talk’, but was sufficiently concerned by it to orchestrate a number of press exclusives intended to raise the profile of the king in relation to the allied military victories in North Africa in May 1943 by positioning the monarch in the limelight alongside his first minister, who had devised the campaign.²¹⁷

George VI’s biographer, Sarah Bradford, has noted that Lascelles talked to confidantes of his annoyance at Churchill’s behaviour and she quotes a personal friend of the royals who reported that the king and queen also felt the prime minister overshadowed them.²¹⁸ On 6 June 1944 – the evening of the D-Day landings – George VI delivered a broadcast to Britain at the insistence of the queen, who thought that he, and not his prime minister, should be the one to speak to them.²¹⁹ The radio message came after a week’s wrangling between the king and Churchill over whether the prime minister should be allowed to watch the D-Day landings from a British cruiser anchored off the French coast. After a series of furious exchanges between the royal household and 10 Downing Street, the prime minister was eventually dissuaded from going. Lascelles described Churchill’s behaviour as selfish and vain; and the king was forced to write to his prime minister pointing out that it would be unfair, given that the latter had expressly advised the monarch against crossing the Channel to watch the invasion out of concern for his safety, for him then to go himself and ‘steal all the thunder’.²²⁰ This was the most fraught exchange in a series of rows between monarch and prime minister that stretched over five years, but it is important to note that, despite the fractious temperaments of both men, their relationship did warm into a close friendship over the course of the Second World War, as evidenced by both Churchill’s admiring descriptions of the king in his history of the conflict and other official sources.²²¹

George VI did not attend the D-Day landings on 6 June, but he did undertake a highly publicized trip to the beaches of Normandy shortly afterwards in order to inspect his troops and, in so doing, stake his claim to the symbolic leadership of the nation’s war effort.²²² This was followed shortly afterwards by an expedition to Italy to inspect the British and imperial troops involved in the northward advance through the country.²²³ Tasked with accompanying the monarch’s party on this trip was the British Movietone News cameraman Graham Thompson and it was on their return to London that the latter was asked to become ‘king’s cameraman’.²²⁴ At the time Thompson was part of the newsreel crew responsible for recording all the film footage for the ‘royal rota’. The five newsreel companies had used rota systems throughout the 1930s in order to save on costs. Rotas were mutually beneficial in that they involved the pooling of resources: one cameraman at a location shot the film for all five companies, with the same footage then being shared among editors. While this meant that newsreels were often formulaic and repetitive in character, the rota system worked well when applied to the monarchy. Not only were the royal family spared the ignominy of having to pose for numerous different camera crews, but having one cameraman film all their activities meant that others were not competing for intimate royal exclusives, which might have led to intrusive coverage.²²⁵ The royal rota was instituted when the Newsreel Association (NRA) first formed in October 1937. It involved the newsreel companies taking turns (initially on a three-month and later a six-month rolling basis) to provide a camera crew to undertake all filming of royal events.²²⁶ However, following the royal excursion to Italy, Thompson was invited to Buckingham Palace and offered a post that would see him become the royal family’s full-time cameraman for the next six years.²²⁷ Talking as part of an oral history interview in 1992, Thompson remarked that, in mid 1944, ‘it was pretty obvious we were going to win the war by this time and Churchill had stolen all the thunder. It was time our royal household got a bit more publicity I think … It was thought that a more intimate coverage by film for the newsreel could be made if one man were nominated’.²²⁸ Thompson’s words again point to concerns at the palace that Churchill had overshadowed George VI and his family and indicate that the royal household felt a need to generate favourable publicity around the monarch. Although Thompson’s initial secondment was only for three months, the palace’s new press secretary, Captain Lewis Ritchie, explained to the committee of the NRA that the king had requested the cameraman be made ‘a permanency’.²²⁹ Securing the NRA’s agreement was difficult, but the committee eventually decided that ‘it would be impolitic to question in any way the personal request of H.M. The King’.²³⁰ Thompson was thus accredited to the palace full-time and, along with the two official court reporters from the Press Association and Exchange Telegraph, controlled the flow of royal media coverage to the outside world.²³¹ Indeed, the newsreel films of royalty from August 1944, when Thompson began in his new role, are characterized by a high level of intimacy: having gained the trust of the king and his family, it is clear that they let him record scenes of them at closer proximity than was normal.²³² This new access even extended to letting Thompson join them on the palace balcony, along with Churchill, during the VE Day celebrations on 8 May 1945 so that he could film the group waving to the crowds gathered outside the gates below.²³³

The famous scene of the prime minister flanked by the king and queen and the princesses on the balcony – reproduced in large front-page photographs by the majority of British newspapers – provided a reassuring image of monarch and prime minister united in victory and served to disguise the tensions that had at times characterized their relationship, as well as the royal household’s ongoing concerns that Churchill had outshone the king as the nation’s war leader (Figure 4.10).²³⁴ We know these images were the result of a co-ordinated effort on the part of courtiers and the media to elevate the House of Windsor as the centre point of the celebrations, as had been the case after the armistice was declared on 11 November 1918 at the end of the First World War. Anticipating victory a month before VE Day was finally announced, Lascelles had instructed Sir Piers Legh, master of the household, ‘to be ready with floodlighting apparatus in Buckingham Palace, in case the King has, at short notice, to show himself to cheering crowds from the balcony’.²³⁵ Similarly, the committee of the Newsreel Association and Ministry of Information put in a special request to the Ministry of Works that they erect a large rostrum for filming on the Victoria memorial, ‘in view of the considerable importance attaching to the “shooting” of happenings in and around Buckingham Palace’.²³⁶ And, on the evening of VE Day, amid the celebrations in central London, it was made known to the press – probably at Lascelles’s instruction – that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, ‘escorted by Guards’ officers, left the Palace after nightfall to mingle with the great crowds outside’ – a final innovation that once again signalled to media audiences that the war had brought crown and people together in unique union.²³⁷

Figure 4.10. ‘Nation’s VE Outburst of Joy’, Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1945, p. 1. © The British Library Board.

However, to judge from Mass Observation personal testimonies, it seems that the war had raised a number of questions about the place of the monarchy in modern Britain that refused to go away, no matter how well co-ordinated royal publicity was in the last years of the conflict. At the beginning of December 1944, in response to a broadcast delivered by the king in acknowledgement of the home guard’s service after the defence organization’s disbandment, Mass Observation conducted a series of impromptu interviews with members of the public in several parts of London, including Chelsea, Battersea and Hampstead. Interviewees were asked what they made of George VI’s speech and what they thought of the royal family. There are only thirty-three sets of answers to be found in the archive, but they include people from all social backgrounds and are notable for the diverse range of attitudes expressed.²³⁸ Just over a third of respondents said that they had listened to the king’s broadcast and most who had focused their replies on the fact that he had spoken much better than he usually did: again, people were clearly preoccupied with the monarch’s delivery ahead of the actual meaning of his words.²³⁹ Those who spoke in admiring terms of the king or his family echoed various comments that had been captured by Mass Observation in earlier studies, including that the royals ‘do a lot of good’, ‘work hard’, that they were ‘conscientious’ and had ‘done much to keep up the morale of the civilian population by their visits of bombed areas’.²⁴⁰ A fifty-year-old man, whom the Mass Observation investigator judged to be lower-middle class, drew on the vocabulary of the burdens of royal status in describing the House of Windsor: ‘When you think of it, it must be an awful life – a rotten job – I wouldn’t change places – your life would never be your own. A human sacrifice, you might call it’.²⁴¹ Meanwhile, some interviewees remarked on the symbolic significance of the crown’s ‘stabilising influence’ in national and imperial politics and others maintained that royalty and constitutional monarchy were ‘better than the alternative’, which reflected a heightened sensitivity to the evils of dictatorship while also echoing comments captured by MO’s 1937 coronation study that favourably compared British democracy to European fascism.²⁴²

However, while there were some approving descriptions of the strengths of Britain’s political system, other interviewees – notably all identified by the investigators as working class – commented that they thought the monarchy was ‘out of date’, that it had ‘outlived’ its use and that a presidential system, like the one in the USA, was preferable because it was more meritocratic and democratic as the head of state had to be voted into power.²⁴³ While these comments suggest that members of the public had thought about the USA’s constitution and compared it favourably to their own political system, their criticisms were often bound up with references to the social inequality intrinsic to the British monarchical model. A twenty-five-year-old woman maintained that ‘a President like Roosevelt does much more good than Royalty – they’re chosen by the people they are. Royalty only grab for themselves, and if they didn’t get so much for instance, that money could go to charity … They don’t care for the likes of us – they pretend they do, but they don’t really. They’re only interested in their own class’.²⁴⁴ Other interviewees similarly remarked on the economic inequities that separated their lives from those of the royal family, which points to the way that the material hardships of the war had raised popular consciousness about the injustices of Britain’s class system. Certainly, the aforementioned woman was not taken in by the expressions of sympathy used by the royal family to present themselves as fellow sufferers. Instead, she believed that the royals were disingenuous in the way they ‘pretend[ed]’ to care for their people and a forty-year-old man expressed similar cynicism about the pretence at the heart of the monarchy’s public relations strategy when he remarked: ‘I’ve not got a lot of feeling about the Royal Family – our Grinning queen and the rest’.²⁴⁵

Positive comments on the king and royal family were just exceeded in number by negative ones. Alongside these were apathetic statements too: a seventy-year-old working-class woman was typical when she described how she had not ‘much time to think of royalty these days – there’s so much to do with washing and ironing and lodgers complaining and one thing and another’.²⁴⁶ A sixty-year-old man who stated that, ‘before the war, what royalty did was the only news we got – now all the news is war news so we don’t hear much about them’, also pointed to the way the conflict had witnessed the sidelining of the monarchy.²⁴⁷ What is clear from the range of opinions articulated by interviewees was that the royal family’s standing in society was certainly neither as strong nor as popular as they and the media claimed was the case: disaffection with the social and economic inequalities that separated royalty from the bulk of society was prominent in these responses – just as it had been in many of the personal testimonies collected by Mass Observation in relation to the monarchy throughout the war.

Conclusion

Despite the mixed picture that characterized public responses to the royal family, the official emphasis in the months immediately after VE Day was on a nation and empire united around the monarchy and its legacy of wartime leadership. In November Lascelles attended a lunch party organized by the King George V Jubilee Trust at St. James’s Palace to launch the official souvenir book, The Royal Family in Wartime.²⁴⁸ This piece of royal propaganda reiterated the key messages that had come to underpin the monarchy’s public image since George VI’s accession to the throne: he and the queen were, first and foremost, the dutiful servants of their people, who had been forced to take on the burdens imposed on royalty in order to ensure national and imperial continuity following the abdication of Edward VIII. According to the book’s narrative and the photographs that illustrated it, the monarchs had developed a close bond with their subjects during the Second World War, engaging with them more intimately and sympathetically than any royals had hitherto done. They had shared in the emotional suffering of their people – be it through separation from their children, as a result of their home being bombed or through the loss of a loved one on active service. But despite these hardships the king and queen had continued, undeterred, to lead the men, women and children of Britain towards victory alongside an outspoken and charismatic prime minister, who nevertheless loyally deferred to his royal superiors. And, in looking to the future, the monarchs had projected a vision of post-war reconstruction that was underpinned by the Christian family life which the House of Windsor had promoted throughout the 1930s.

The Royal Family in Wartime was the outcome of an expert public relations operation that had been developed by the royal household in the aftermath of the coronation and over the course of a six-year global conflict. Lascelles and other courtiers had managed to retain control over the royal public image despite the best efforts of external actors, including civil servants and government ministers, to exploit it to their own ends. This was something Lascelles resented, as he indicated to his friend and collaborator, Cosmo Lang, as the war drew to a close.²⁴⁹ Two weeks after the launch of the new royal commemorative book, the former archbishop died aged eighty-one after collapsing from a heart attack while on the way to Kew Gardens underground station, near to where George VI had given him a grace-and-favour home in acknowledgement of all he had done for the House of Windsor.²⁵⁰ However, his service on behalf of the monarchy was complete: he had worked with the palace to elevate a set of messages that would come to define the royal family’s public image for the remainder of the twentieth century. And, fortunately for Lascelles, a new high priest of royal publicity had made himself known, having prepared what the king’s private secretary described as an ‘admirable foreword on that threadbare theme, the duties of a monarch’, for The Royal Family in Wartime.²⁵¹ As we shall see, The Times’s Dermot Morrah would go on to work closely with the royal household in trying to maintain a stable and popular image of the crown in the face of growing public criticism regarding decisions made by members of the royal family and the privileged position occupied by the House of Windsor in an increasingly democratic British society.

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1 King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, ed. D. Hart-Davis (London, 2006), pp. 297–8.

2 Cosmo Lang retired in 1942 and was succeeded as archbishop of Canterbury by William Temple. Lang’s last official act in office was to confirm Princess Elizabeth in the Christian faith.

3 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 138–42.

4 The extent of social levelling brought about by the war is contested by historians, with many revisionist accounts challenging Richard Titmuss’s original argument in the Problems of Social Policy (London, 1950) that the experience of the home front united Britain and generated an optimism and desire among all classes for progressive political change after the war had ended. See, e.g., J. Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives: Mass-Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford, 2010), pp. 11–4. However, some historians have traced a shift leftwards, however vague and incremental, towards a more egalitarian public mood, which, in part, sprung from the plans set out for post-war reconstruction by the Beveridge Report in 1942. See R. Lowe, ‘The Second World War, consensus, and the foundation of the welfare state’, Twentieth Century British Hist., i (1990), 152–82, at pp. 158–60; M. Donnelly, Britain in the Second World War (Oxford, 1999), pp. 49–51; J. Gardiner, Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (London, 2004), pp. 581–7; A. Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London, 1992), pp. 525–45.

5 M. Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (London, 2004), pp. 28, 63, 89, 150–2.

6 These reports include File Report 247, ‘The Royal Family’, 4 July 1940; File Report 22, ‘Newsreel Report’, 28 Jan. 1940; File Report 141, ‘Newsreel Report 2’, 27 May 1940; File Report 444, ‘Newsreel Report 3’, 6 Oct. 1940; File Report 1392, ‘Death of the Duke of Kent’, 25 Aug. 1942; TC14/79-86; TC14/154-186; TC65/4074-4220; TC23/4419-4502.

7 P. Summerfield, ‘Mass-Observation: social research or social movement?’, Jour. Contemp. Hist., xx (1985), 439–52, at pp. 444–7; P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester, 1998), pp. 4–5; N. Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 8; J. Hinton, The Mass Observers: a History, 1937–1949 (Oxford, 2013), esp. pp. 153–4.

8 Hinton, The Mass Observers, pp. 166–215.

9 On the MO diarists, see Summerfield, ‘Mass-Observation’, p. 441; Hinton, The Mass Observers, p. 140. Where diaries have been used, they have been referred to using the number assigned them by Mass Observation.

10 The Newsreel Association’s minute books are held by the BFI National Archive and offer a unique perspective on the operations and discussions that went into producing newsreel coverage of events across Britain, Europe and the rest of the world. Thompson’s oral history interview was conducted in 1992 and has been made available by the British Entertainment History Project <https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/graham-thompson> [accessed 25 Apr. 2017]. Lascelles started writing his wartime diary on 2 June 1942, which unfortunately means that some of the most interesting parts of the war – notably the crisis year of summer 1940 to summer 1941 – were not documented by him.

11 In 1944 Lascelles reinstated the palace’s press office, under press secretary Captain Lewis Ritchie (see M. Maclagan, ‘Alan Frederick Lascelles’, in Royal Lives: Portraits of the Past Royals by Those in the Know, ed. F. Prochaska (Oxford, 2002), pp. 570–2). Before then he managed royalty’s public relations alongside the king’s other assistant private secretary, Sir Eric Miéville.

12 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. xiv, 72–3, 324–5.

13 Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, iii: the Later Years 1945–62, ed. N. Nicolson (London, 1968), pp. 142–4.

14 Lascelles is ever-respectful of his royal employers and (within this edited collection of diary entries) refrains from criticizing their foibles or failures. The notable exception is Edward VIII. Lascelles had worked for him when he was prince of Wales and is often at pains to disparage the ex-king’s personality and actions throughout the diaries. The courtier’s role in ‘re-inventing’ the monarchy after the 1936 abdication crisis was notable for the way he sought to elevate George VI and the new royal family as everything that Edward was not – i.e., domestic, dutiful and self-sacrificing.

15 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 81–3 and 130. Unfortunately, the selective publication of Lascelles’s diaries limits the discussion of his public relations strategy. The editor of the diaries, D. Hart-Davis, is the son of one of Lascelles’s closest friends and does a good job of maintaining courtly discretion while painting a positive image of his subject. This author’s request (in March 2017) to view Lascelles’s original wartime diaries (LASL 1/2) at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, was rejected by the Royal Archives, which had recently conducted a review of his papers and decided to keep them closed to researchers.

16 The 2 studies that have surveyed the wartime activities of the Ministry of Information hardly mention the monarchy. See I. McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, 1979), pp. 78, 92–3; R. Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain during the Second World War (Manchester, 2002), pp. 63, 145–7, 163.

17 J. Fox,‘The propaganda war’, in The Cambridge History of the Second World War (3 vols., Cambridge, 2015), ii: Politics and Ideology, ed. R. J. B. Bosworth and J. A. Maiolo, pp. 91–116, at p. 94; S. Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 42–3, 71–2; J. Seaton, ‘Broadcasting and the blitz’, in Power without Responsibility: the Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain, ed. J. Curran and J. Seaton (London, 2009), pp. 120–42, at pp. 133–4.

18 Calder, The People’s War, p. 138; S. O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 1–5, 29.

19 Calder, The People’s War, pp. 304–7; Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 91–2, 98, 125–6.

20 TNA, INF 1/670, W. R. Codling to A. P. Waterfield, 29 June 1939, ‘Appendix A: Prime Minister’s Broadcast’.

21 V. Holman, ‘Carefully concealed connections: the Ministry of Information and British publishing, 1939–1946’, Book History, viii (2005), 197–226, at pp. 198–200; J. Ellul, Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York, 1971), pp. 241–50.

22 Fox, ‘Propaganda war’, pp. 94–6.

23 TNA, INF 1/670, W. R. Codling to A. P. Waterfield, 29 June 1939.

24 TNA, INF 1/670, O.E.P.E.C. Paper No. 21 – ‘King’s Message’. See also handwritten memorandum signed M. L. G. Balfour, 28 July 1939.

25 H. Jones, ‘The nature of kingship in First World War Britain’, in The Windsor Dynasty 1910 to the Present: ‘Long to Reign Over Us’?, ed. M. Glencross, J. Rowbottom and M. D. Kandiah (Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 195–216, at pp. 196–201.

26 M. Shapira, The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 32–5.

27 TNA, INF 1/670, ‘King’s Message (war-time)’, undated; J. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (London, 1958), pp. 406–7. See also H. Irving, ‘Keep calm and carry on – the compromise behind the slogan’ <https://history.blog.gov.uk/2014/06/27/keep-calm-and-carry-on-the-compromise-behind-the-slogan> [accessed 2 Feb. 2018].

28 TNA, INF 1/670, A. P. Waterfield to S. Hoare, 25 July 1939.

29 LPL, Lang 318, fos. 151–4, S. Hoare to C. G. Lang, 10, 18 and 28 Aug. 1939.

30 LPL, Lang 318, fo. 154, S. Hoare to C. G. Lang, 28 Aug. 1939.

31 TNA, INF 1/670, handwritten memorandum from A. P. Waterfield to Miss Gilbert, 3 Sept. 1939.

32 TNA, INF 1/670, MoI News Division Evening Bulletin, 3 Sept. 1939.

33 TNA, INF 1/670, A. Hardinge to S. Hood, 9 and 16 Oct. 1939.

34 Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI, p. 406.

35 TNA, INF 1/670, I. Macadam to A. P. Waterfield, 30 Aug. 1939.

36 TNA, INF 1/670, A. P. Waterfield to I. Macadam, 30 Aug. 1939.

37 E.g., Daily Express, 4 Sept. 1939, p. 7; Daily Mirror, 4 Sept. 1939, p. 1.

38 Daily Mail, 4 Sept. 1939, p. 2; Daily Express, 4 Sept. 1939, p.7.

39 Daily Mirror, 4 Sept. 1939, p. 3; Daily Sketch, 4 Sept. 1939, p. 1.

40 Daily Worker, 4 Sept. 1939, p. 1.

41 MOA, 5141; also quoted in P. Ziegler, Crown and People (London, 1978), p. 69.

42 MOA, 5228.

43 Ziegler, Crown and People, pp. 69–71. Ziegler’s argument regarding a declining listenership is not entirely borne out by the investigations undertaken by the BBC’s listener research department. The listener research department’s figures suggest that, on average, just less than two-thirds of all British adults tended to listen to the king’s speech on Christmas Day during the war years. Notably, there was a small decline of approximately 10% in the early years of the war, with the 1942 broadcast heard by 56.9% of listeners. However, the figure was back in the mid 60% bracket the following year, where it remained. Winston Churchill tended to draw larger audiences with his broadcasts, regularly reaching more than 70% of adult listeners – a feat never equalled by the king. A notable case in point was the prime minister’s VE Day speech, which was heard by 71.5% of the adult population according to the BBC’s estimates, compared with the king’s speech on the same day, which had a listenership of 68.9% (BBCWA 248/R9/1/4 Listener Research Bulletin no. 225 and 248/R9/1/5, Listener Research Bulletin no. 244).

44 Hinton, The Mass Observers, p. 142.

45 W. Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: the Official Biography (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 480–1.

46 Rose, Which People’s War?, pp. 131–5; S. Harper, ‘The years of total war: propaganda and entertainment’, in Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War, ed. C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (Manchester, 1996), pp. 193–212, at pp. 195–6.

47 TNA, INF 1/670, I. Macadam to A. P. Waterfield, 30 Aug. 1939.

48 TNA, INF 1/670, A. P. Waterfield to I. Macadam, 2 Sept. 1939.

49 A. Bingham, ‘Godfrey Herbert Winn (1906–1971)’, in ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/95220> [accessed 1 March 2018].

50 TNA, INF 1/670, B. H. Needham to A. P. Waterfield, 7 Sept. 1939.

51 TNA, INF 1/670, handwritten memorandum signed by A. P. Waterfield on 9 Sept. 1939, on original letter from B. H. Needham to Waterfield, 7 Sept. 1939.

52 TNA, INF 1/670, ‘Draft by Godfrey Winn for The Queen’s Message’, with handwritten annotations.

53 TNA, INF 1/670, ‘Queen’s Message’.

54 Quoted in J. Fox, ‘Careless talk: tensions within British domestic propaganda during the Second World War’, Jour. Brit. Stud., li (2012), 936–66, at p. 948.

55 TNA, INF 1/670, Memorandum from I. Macadam to B. H. Needham, 13 Sept. 1939.

56 It began: ‘My Countrywomen: I am speaking to you as a wife and a mother to other wives and mothers, and as a woman to all other women’ (TNA, INF 1/670, ‘Draft for the Queen’s Message’). See also F. Prochaska, Royal Bounty: the Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, Conn., 1995), p. 223.

57 TNA, INF 1/670, ‘Draft for the Queen’s Message’.

58 TNA, INF 1/670, handwritten memorandum from SFS to Lord Macmillan, 15 Sept. 1939. This civil servant could not be identified.

59 F. Mort, ‘On tour with the prince: monarchy, imperial politics and publicity in the prince of Wales’s dominion tours 1919–20’, Twentieth Century British Hist., xxix (2018), 25–57.

60 TNA, INF 1/670, A. P. Waterfield to the Director General, 19 Sept. 1939.

61 Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, pp. 497–8.

62 See, e.g., Daily Mail, 13 Nov. 1939, p. 6.

63 Although one cannot be sure this was the case without access to his papers and correspondence, Lascelles was the main royal speechwriter throughout the war. The final spoken version was also very different to the MoI drafts in The National Archives (Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 118, 122, 292).

64 RA, QEQMH/PS/SPE: BROADCASTS 11 Nov. 1939, ‘Broadcast by H.M. The Queen’.

65 B. Pimlott, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy (London, 2002), pp. 56–7; M. Crawford, The Little Princesses (London, 1993), p. 61.

66 ‘The Queen’s Broadcast Message’, Pathé Gazette, 16 Nov. 1939. The original broadcast of the queen’s message was recorded by the newsreels <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh0FXRyOacI> [accessed 2 Dec. 2018] (at 04:16).

67 TNA, INF 13/171, ‘Don’t do it, Mother – Leave your Children in the Safer Areas’.

68 LPL, Lang 318, fos. 199–200, Queen Elizabeth to C. G. Lang, 6 Nov. 1939 (the queen’s emphasis).

69 RA, QEQMH/PS/SPE: BROADCASTS, 11 Nov. 1939, ‘Broadcast by H.M. The Queen’.

70 RA, QEQM/PRIV/PAL/LANG, C. G. Lang to Queen Elizabeth, 11 Nov. 1939.

71 RA, QEQM/PRIV/GEN, E. W. Evans to Queen Elizabeth, 11 Nov. 1939.

72 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/04298, Anon. to Queen Elizabeth, 12 Nov. 1939 (original emphasis).

73 RA, QEQM/PRIV/PAL, C. Wigram to Queen Elizabeth, 12 Nov. 1939.

74 RA, QEQM/PRIV/PAL, P. Mackenzie, Y. de Rothschild; and G. Weigall to Queen Elizabeth, 12/13 Nov. 1939.

75 MOA, 5390, 5312, 5363, 5442.

76 MOA, 5349.

77 MOA, 5275.

78 Daily Telegraph, 13 Nov. 1939, p. 4. See also Daily Mirror, 13 Nov. 1939, p. 5; and Sunday Times, 12 Nov. 1939, p. 11.

79 Sunday Pictorial, 1 Oct. 1939, p. 7. See also 8 Oct. 1939, p. 23; 15 Oct. 1939, p. 21; 22 Oct. 1939, p. 18; 29 Oct. 1939, p. 21.

80 S. Brown, ‘Cecil Beaton and the iconography of the House of Windsor’, Photography & Culture, iv (2011), 293–308, at p. 299; R. Brunt, ‘The family firm restored: newsreel coverage of the British monarchy 1936–45’, in Gledhill and Swanson, Nationalising Femininity, pp. 140–51, at p. 148.

81 ‘The Queen’s Broadcast Message’, Pathé Gazette, 16 Nov. 1939.

82 Daily Mirror, 13 Nov. 1939, p. 5.

83 Sunday Express, 12 Nov. 1939, p. 4.

84 I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal rations’, History Today, xliii (1993), pp. 13–5. On the importance of the wartime language of ‘equality of sacrifice’, see Rose, Which People’s War?, pp. 31–4.

85 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 57–8.

86 MOA, File Report 247, ‘The Royal Family’, 4 July 1940.

87 Calder, The People’s War, pp. 138–9; Nicholas, Echo of War, pp. 57–62, 244–5.

88 See ch. 3.

89 Brunt, ‘The family firm restored’, pp. 140–1.

90 P. Ziegler, King Edward VIII (London, 1990), pp. 406–7; H. Jones, ‘A prince in the trenches? Edward VIII and the First World War’, in Sons and Heirs: Succession and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. F. L. Müller and H. Mehrkens (Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 229–46.

91 Daily Express, 11 Sept. 1939, p. 4; 14 Sept. 1939, pp. 7 and 12; 2 Oct. 1939, p. 1; Daily Mirror, 15 Sept. 1939, p. 3; 20 Oct. 1939, p. 3; 20 Nov. 1939, p. 20.

92 MOA, File Report 22, ‘Newsreel Report’, 28 Jan. 1940.

93 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 386–401.

94 ‘Duke and Duchess of Windsor Home’, Pathé Gazette, 18 Sept. 1939; ‘Duke and Duchess of Windsor Return Home’, Gaumont British News, 17 Sept. 1939; ‘Major-General the Duke of Windsor’, Pathé Gazette, 9 Oct. 1939; ‘Major-General the Duke of Windsor at French Headquarters’, Pathé Gazette, 23 Oct. 1939; ‘With the Army “Over There”’, Pathé Gazette, 28 Oct. 1939.

95 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 407–12.

96 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 416–36. This was the period during which Edward became the focus of Nazi intrigue, although Ziegler (while often damning of the duke’s character) is extremely doubtful that he ever collaborated with the enemy in any way at all.

97 Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 425–9.

98 MOA, File Report 141, ‘Newsreel Report 2’, 27 May 1940. In fact, in this period the duke only appeared in one newsreel story: ‘Duke and Duchess of Windsor Visit Famous French Fighter Squadron’, British Paramount News, 25 March 1940.

99 It is possible that British journalists and cameramen were prevented or dissuaded by royal officials or military authorities from reporting on Edward’s activities, although evidence of this is yet to be located.

100 Daily Mirror, 24 June 1940, pp. 1–2; Daily Express, 29 June 1940, p. 1.

101 Daily Express, 8 June 1940, p. 1; Daily Worker, 10 July 1940, p. 3; Ziegler, King Edward VIII, pp. 417–18.

102 MOA, File Report 247, ‘The Royal Family’, 4 July 1940.

103 MOA, File Report 141, ‘Newsreel Report 2’, 27 May 1940.

104 Also see MOA, File Report 444, ‘Newsreel Report 3’, 6 Oct. 1940.

105 On Churchill’s popularity in summer 1940, see R. Toye, The Roar of the Lion: the Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (Oxford, 2013), pp. 61–72.

106 MOA, File Report 247, ‘The Royal Family’, 4 July 1940.

107 Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, p. 491; S. Bradford, King George VI (London, 2011), pp. 427–30.

108 Brunt, ‘The family firm restored’, pp. 147–8; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal rations’, p. 13.

109 Connelly, We Can Take It, pp. 128 and 150–2.

110 TNA, HO 186/1636, T. B. Braund to J. H. Brebner, 13 Aug. 1940.

111 TNA, HO 186/1636, Unknown to H. V. Rhodes, 20 Aug. 1940.

112 TNA, HO 186/1636, E. Miéville to F. N. Hillier, 25 Oct. 1940.

113 F. Mort, ‘Safe for democracy: constitutional politics, popular spectacle, and the British monarchy 1910–1914’, Jour. Brit. Stud., lviii (2019), 109–41.

114 Louis Wulff was one of these accredited court reporters. RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/ VISUK/02428/124 refers to Wulff’s being a journalist with the Press Association who was present at George VI’s and Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Yorkshire in 1937. RA, PS/PSO/GVI/ PS/WARVIS/04648/1 refers to Wulff’s being present as a PA-accredited journalist during the king and queen’s visit to the Midlands on 18 and 19 April 1940. On the prince of Wales, see Mort, ‘On tour with the prince’, pp. 48–9.

115 TNA, HO 186/1636, A. Lambert to T. Gardiner, 1 Aug. 1940; J. H. Brebner to T. B. Braund, 12 Sept. 1940.

116 TNA, HO 186/1636, J. H. Brebner to T. B. Braund, 12 Sept. 1940.

117 TNA, HO 186/1636, F. N. Hillier to T. B. Braund, 24 Sept. 1940; Mr. Kirk to T. B. Braund, 15 Oct. 1940.

118 TNA, HO 186/1636, J. H. Brebner to D. C. Bolster, 3 Oct. 1940.

119 TNA, HO 186/1636, E. Miéville to F. N. Hillier, 25 Oct. 1940.

120 There is no additional documentary evidence in The National Archives to suggest that the government continued to issue complaints to the royal household about access to royal tours of blitzed areas.

121 E.g., the Pathé Gazette series: ‘King and Queen in Raided Areas’, 23 Sept. 1940; ‘King and Queen Tour Merseyside’, 14 Nov. 1940; ‘Their Majesties in Sheffield’, 13 Jan. 1941; ‘Royal Tour of Bombed Areas’, 20 Feb. 1941; ‘Their Majesties in South Wales’, 24 March 1941.

122 TNA, HO 186/1636, H. Morrison to R. H. Jerman, 16 March 1944; Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 243. However, royal tours of areas affected by rocket attacks were discontinued because the missiles were landing wide of their intended targets and the British authorities did not want to draw attention to this fact (King’s Counsellor, p. 301).

123 TNA, HO 186/1636, ‘Detailed List of Royal Tours Conducted by Admiral Sir Edward Evans’. Notably, the duke of Kent regularly stood in for George VI on tours of London, as this document shows.

124 TNA, HO 186/1636, copy of memorandum by Admiral Sir Edward Evans, 17 Oct. 1940; A. Hardinge to H. U. Willink, 1 July 1941.

125 TNA, HO 186/1636, E. Gowers to F. D. Littlewood, 28 Apr. 1941; A. Lascelles to A. S Hutchinson, 21 Oct. 1942.

126 TNA, HO 186/1636, A. Lascelles to A. S Hutchinson, 21 Oct. 1942; Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 67–8.

127 TNA, HO 186/1636, H. U. Willink to H. Campbell, 28 June 1941. See also F. Marquis, The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Woolton (London, 1959), pp. 222–4.

128 Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters: the War Years 1939–45, ed. N. Nicolson (London, 1967), 114.

129 McLaine, Ministry of Morale, pp. 92–5.

130 TNA, INF 1/64, Intelligence report by J. H. Brebner, MoI News Division: ‘Bombing of Buckingham Palace’.

131 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 15–6.

132 Daily Sketch, 12 Sept. 1940, p. 1; News Chronicle, 12 Sept. 1940, p. 1; Sunday Pictorial, 15 Sept. 1940, p. 1.

133 ‘King and Queen in Raided Areas’, Pathé News, 23 Sept. 1940.

134 TNA, INF 1/64, Intelligence report by J. H. Brebner, MoI News Division: ‘Bombing of Buckingham Palace’.

135 MOA, TC23/4419-4502 (original emphasis).

136 R. Dudley Edwards, Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street (London, 2003), p. 165.

137 B. Pimlott suggested that the MoI came up with the idea for the princess’s broadcast (Elizabeth II, pp. 58–9); A. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom (5 vols. Oxford, 1965–95), iii. 28–31; Nicholas, The Echo of War, pp. 42–3, 71–2.

138 BBCWA, R30/3,724/1, Memorandum by S. J. de Lotbinière: ‘Princess Elizabeth in Children’s Hour’, 4 Sept. 1940.

139 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/04970, F. W. Ogilvy to A. Hardinge, 13 Oct. 1940.

140 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 58–60.

141 RA, PS/PSO/GV/PS/MAIN/55357, T. E. Hartnoll to King George V, 16 Nov. 1934. See also letters from J. Abbot, H. Grayson, G. A. Whittle and M. E. King; and Pimlott, Elizabeth II, p. 58.

142 BBCWA, R34/862/1, H. Verney to A. Dawnay, 2 Dec. 1933; L. B. Hyde to J. Reith, 22 Nov. 1933.

143 On Tallents, see S. Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession (Manchester, 2012).

144 BBCWA, R30/3,724/1, draft dated 23 Sept. 1940. See also ‘Draft Layout: Announcement: Outline of Princess Elizabeth’s Speech and details of rest of programme’, undated.

145 BBCWA, R30/3,724/1, unsigned memorandum marked ‘Private and Confidential’, 4 Oct. 1940.

146 BBCWA, R30/3, 724/1, S. Tallents to A. Lascelles, 5 Oct. 1940. See also ‘Draft Layout: Announcement: Outline of Princess Elizabeth’s Speech and details of rest of programme’, undated.

147 The Times, 14 Oct. 1940, p. 4.

148 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/04970, F. W. Ogilvie to A. Lascelles, 19 Oct. 1940.

149 The answers to their questions can be located in MOA, TC65/4074-4220. They are included here with the identities assigned to them by the MO investigators: F/M to distinguish gender; followed by their age; followed by their class where A is upper class and D is working class.

150 MOA, File Report 459, 18 Oct. 1940, pp. 42–3.

151 The BBC’s listener research department estimated that 50.7% of Britain’s adult population tuned in to hear the princess speak. This was a sizeable increase compared to its usual Sunday children’s hour adult listenership, which ranged from 7% to 11% (BBCWA, 248/R9/1/1, Listener Research Weekly Report no. 11).

152 MOA, TC65/4074-4220.

153 J. Fox, ‘Winston Churchill and the “men of destiny”: leadership and the role of the prime minister in wartime feature films’, in Making Reputations: Power, Persuasion and the Individual in Modern British, ed. R. Toye and J. V. Gottlieb (London, 2005), pp. 92–108, at p. 97; Fox, ‘Careless talk’, pp. 950–1.

154 MOA, 5220. See also MOA, File Report 462, ‘Worcester Village Report’, 20 Oct. 1940, p. 2.

155 MOA, File Report 459, 18 Oct. 1940, pp. 42–3 (original emphasis).

156 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/04970, D. McCulloch to A. Lascelles, 21 Oct. 1940.

157 Daily Express, 14 Oct. 1940, p. 3; Daily Mirror, 14 Oct. 1940, p. 1; Daily Mail, 14 Oct. 1940, p. 3; Daily Telegraph, 14 Oct. 1940, pp. 1 and 4; The Times, 14 Oct. 1940, pp. 5–6.

158 ‘Princess Elizabeth Broadcasts’, Pathé Gazette, 17 Oct. 1940; ‘Princess Elizabeth’s Message’, British Movietone News, 17 Oct. 1940.

159 Brown, ‘Cecil Beaton’, pp. 293–308.

160 On this contrast, see also Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 60–1. Much of Adams’s wartime photography of the royal family can be found under the search term ‘Marcus Adams’ in the online archive of the Royal Collection <https://www.royalcollection.org.uk> [accessed 5 March 2019].

161 See also the reproduction of images in Daily Express, 17 Apr. 1941, p. 3; Daily Mirror, 21 Apr. 1941, p. 3; Manchester Guardian, 21 Apr. 1941, p. 6.

162 Daily Telegraph, 21 Apr. 1941, p. 6.

163 Daily Express, 22 Apr. 1944, p. 3; Daily Telegraph, 22 Apr. 1944, p. 5; The Times, 22 Apr. 1942, p. 6; The Times, 22 Apr. 1944, pp. 1 and 6.

164 Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 69–70.

165 The Times, 22 Apr. 1942, p. 6; Daily Telegraph, 22 Apr. 1942, p. 5.

166 Jones, ‘A prince in the trenches’, pp. 230–5.

167 Daily Express, 21 Apr. 1943, p. 4; Daily Mirror, 21 Apr. 1943, p. 5; The Times, 21 Apr. 1944, p. 6; ‘Princess Elizabeth Second Subaltern’, Pathé Gazette, 19 Apr. 1945. See also Pimlott, Elizabeth II, pp. 74–5.

168 T. Fleming, Voices Out of the Air: Royal Christmas Day Broadcasts, 1932–1981 (London, 1981), pp. 36–8.

169 M. Johnes, Christmas and the British: a Modern History (London, 2016), p. 158.

170 Calder, The People’s War, pp. 263–4, 524–5.

171 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 91–2, 98 and 125.

172 Calder, The People’s War, pp. 525–45. See also n. 4.

173 On the duke’s death, see Daily Sketch, 26 Aug. 1934, p. 1; Daily Herald, 26 Aug. 1934, p. 1; News Chronicle, 26 Aug. 1934, p. 2; Daily Express, 26 Aug. 1934, pp. 1 and 4; Daily Mirror, 26 Aug. 1934, p. 1; ‘In Memory: HRH The Duke of Kent’, British Movietone News, 27 Aug. 1942; ‘The Death of the Duke of Kent’, Universal News, 3 Sept. 1942.

174 MOA, 5447. See also MOA, 5277, 5324; and MOA, File Report 1392, ‘Death of the Duke of Kent’, 25 Aug. 1942.

175 E.g., Sunday Pictorial, 30 Aug. 1942, p. 3.

176 MOA, 5390.

177 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Royal rations’, pp. 14–5.

178 MOA, File Report 1392, ‘Death of the Duke of Kent’.

179 H. L. Smith, ‘The effect of the war on the status of women’, in War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War, ed. H. L. Smith (Manchester, 1986), pp. 208–29, at p. 214. According to A. Lascelles, at the time when older women were compelled to register for war work, he discussed with George VI whether or not the queen should register with her ‘age-group’. The courtier came down against the idea, reasoning that she had already dedicated herself to a lifetime of service in the national cause in her coronation vows and it would appear farcical, possibly even undermining the government’s scheme. The fact that this conversation took place does, however, show how seriously the king took his and the queen’s public roles as exemplars of the nation’s war effort and the idea that they should at least be seen to share in the burdens brought about by the conflict (Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 39–40).

180 P. Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London, 2013), pp. 53–6; G. Braybon and P. Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London, 2013), pp. 235–56.

181 Smith, ‘The effect of the war’, p. 216.

182 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, E. Bevin to A. Hardinge, 3 Dec. 1942.

183 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, C. J. Radcliffe to A. Hardinge, 8 Aug. 1942.

184 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, A. Hardinge to C. J. Radcliffe, 10 Aug. 1942.

185 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, handwritten memorandum from Queen Elizabeth to A. Hardinge, 15 Aug. 1942.

186 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, E. Bevin to A. Hardinge, 3 Dec. 1942.

187 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 68.

188 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, A. Hardinge to E. Bevin, 7 Dec. 1942.

189 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, E. Bevin to A. Hardinge, 18 Dec. 1942 and reply on 21 Dec. 1942.

190 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, handwritten memorandum from A. Lascelles to A. Hardinge, 25 Jan. 1943; A. Hardinge to B. Bracken, 31 March 1943.

191 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, E. Bevin to A. Hardinge, 15 Jan. 1943.

192 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, handwritten memorandum from A. Lascelles to A. Hardinge, 25 Jan. 1943; A. Hardinge to B. Bracken, 26 Jan. 1943.

193 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, E. C. Miéville to G. T. Cummins, 9 Apr. 1943.

194 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, handwritten memorandum from A. Lascelles to A. Hardinge, 25 Jan. 1943.

195 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, handwritten memorandum from A. Hardinge to the private secretary of the queen, 14 Feb. 1943.

196 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, list that accompanied letter from E. Bevin to A. Hardinge, 10 March 1943.

197 RA, PS/PSO/GVI/PS/MAIN/03959/C, handwritten memorandum from A. Hardinge to the private secretary of the queen, 14 Feb. 1943; A. Hardinge to E. Bevin, 1 March 1943.

198 See copies of the speech in RA, QEQMH/PS/SPE: BROADCASTS, 11 Apr. 1943 and GVI/PS/3959(1)C. See also Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, p. 564 and Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 122.

199 See copy of the speech in RA, QEQMH/PS/SPE: BROADCASTS, 11 Apr. 1943. Again, this emphasis can be heard in the filmed recording of the message: ‘Her Majesty’s Broadcast’, British Movietone News, 15 Apr. 1943 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlju36D_Vno> [accessed 3 Apr. 2018].

200 Rose, Which People’s War?, pp. 107–9.

201 P. Mandler, The English National Character: the History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (London, 2006), pp. 168–70.

202 Braybon and Summerfield, Out of the Cage, p. 272; C. Langhamer, The English in Love: the Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford, 2013), pp. 70–1.

203 MOA, 5443.

204 Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, pp. 563–4.

205 MOA, 5447.

206 MOA, 5415.

207 MOA, 052. For the same sentiment see MOA, 5176.

208 MOA, 5283. The BBC’s listener research department estimated that 66.5% of the adult population heard the queen’s broadcast. Investigators noted that the responses of three-quarters of interviewees who had heard it were ‘extremely favourable’, while the other quarter were mostly ‘favourable’. According to the BBC’s interviewees, the speech was a success because it was considered ‘noble and uplifting’ and the queen’s manner was appreciated, being described as ‘pleasant, homely, and sincere’ (BBCWA, 248/R9/1/3, Listener Research Weekly Bulletin, no. 135).

209 MOA, 5376.

210 Daily Sketch, 12 Apr. 1943, p. 1.

211 Daily Express, 12 Apr. 1943, p. 3; Daily Sketch, 12 Apr. 1943, p. 5; Daily Herald, 12 Apr. 1943, p. 3; News Chronicle, 12 Apr. 1943, p. 3.

212 ‘Her Majesty’s Broadcast’, British Movietone News, 15 Apr. 1943; ‘Her Majesty’s Broadcast’, British Paramount News, 15 Apr. 1943.

213 See n. 43 above. As Richard Toye has noted, Churchill’s speeches were not always received well and his rhetoric was by no means always inspiring (Toye, The Roar of the Lion).

214 M. Francis, ‘Tears, tantrums, and bared teeth: the emotional economy of three Conservative prime ministers, 1951–1963’, Jour. Brit. Stud., xli (2002), 354–87, at p. 374. For comments on the king’s stronger leadership style, see Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 172 and 177.

215 D. Cannadine, ‘Churchill and the British monarchy’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., xi (2001), 249–72, at pp. 262–3; Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 125; Bradford, King George VI, p. 449.

216 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 130.

217 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 130.

218 Bradford, King George VI, pp. 449–50.

219 Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, p. 581.

220 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 224–8.

221 W. S. Churchill, The Second World War: Abridged Edition with an Epilogue on the Years 1945 to 1957 (London, 2002), pp. 219, 365–6; Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, pp. 514–5; Cannadine, ‘Churchill and the British monarchy’, pp. 263–4.

222 ‘Beyond the Beaches: The King Visits Normandy While Troops Press On’, Gaumont British News, 22 June 1944; ‘The King Sees Invasion Going Well’, British Paramount News, 22 June 1944.

223 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 242, 247–9.

224 Interview with G. Thompson, 28 Jan. 1992, side 2 (03:55–05:00) <https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/graham-thompson> [accessed 25 Apr. 2017]. See also L. McKernan, ‘The finest cinema performers we possess: British royalty and the newsreels, 1910–37’, Court Historian, viii (2003), 59–71, at pp. 68–9.

225 Mort, ‘On tour with the prince’, pp. 50–1.

226 For more information on the NRA, see J. Hulbert, ‘The Newsreel Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ <http://bufvc.ac.uk/wp-content/media/2009/06/newsreel_association.pdf> [accessed 1 Feb. 2018].

227 Indeed, the NRA minutes show that Howard Thomas of Pathé News complained that Thompson was no longer beholden to the newsreel companies for whom he worked but instead had switched his allegiances to the royal household, ‘becoming more a Palace official, and less a newsreel cameraman’, doing exactly what courtiers told him (BFINA, NRA vol. 4, m.2665 ‘Royal Cameraman’, 28 Oct. 1948). See also McKernan, ‘The finest cinema performers’, pp. 68–9. Thompson was replaced in 1950 by P. J. Turner, who remained in the post until 1962 (J. Turner, Filming History: the Memoirs of John Turner, Newsreel Cameraman (London, 2001)).

228 Thompson, Interview <https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/graham-thompson>, side 2 (04:00–05:00).

229 Thompson, Interview <https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/graham-thompson>, side 2 (05:00–06:00).

230 BFINA, NRA vol. 3, m.1756, ‘Cameraman Accredited to Buckingham Palace’, 1 Nov. 1944; see also m.1643.

231 Thompson, Interview <https://historyproject.org.uk/interview/graham-thompson>, side 2 (08:00–08:55).

232 E.g., ‘Royal Tour of Scotland’, British Movietone News, 28 Sept. 1944; ‘His Majesty on the Continent’, Pathé Gazette, 23 Oct. 1944; ‘King Tours Lancashire’, British Paramount News, 19 March 1945; ‘Princess Elizabeth Second Subaltern’, Pathé Gazette, 19 Apr. 1945.

233 It is unclear whether these scenes were, in fact, released for screening as part of a newsreel. They can be seen at (01.47) in unissued footage from the Pathé archive, ‘VE Day London’ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5ZerMjt9nw> [accessed 2 Feb. 2018]. Notably, Thompson can be glimpsed walking out onto the balcony with the royal family before disappearing out of shot in ‘The Fruits of Victory’, Pathé News, 17 May 1945 <https://www.britishpathe.com/video/the-fruits-of-victory> (06:15). See also ‘V.E. Day in London’, British Movietone News, 14 May 1945 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEavcsrMoMw>; and ‘Royal Family Celebrates V.E. Day’, 14 May 1945, Gaumont British News, in which Princess Elizabeth can be seen talking to Thompson, who is out of shot. This experiment of inviting a cameraman onto the balcony has not been trialled again since.

234 Daily Mail, 9 May 1945, p. 1; Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1945, p. 1; Daily Sketch, 9 May 1945, p. 1; Daily Herald, 9 May 1945, p. 2; Daily Express, 9 May 1945, p. 3. Interestingly, the Daily Mirror did not reproduce the image, which was indicative of the increasingly anti-elite stance it would adopt in the immediate post-war years.

235 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 307.

236 BFINA, NRA vol. 3, m.1910 ‘Coverage of “V.E. Day”’, 26 Apr. 1945.

237 Daily Telegraph, 9 May 1945, pp. 1 and 6; Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, p. 322.

238 MOA, TC/14 154-186 and TC/14 79-86.

239 MOA, TC/14 154-186, F45B, F40C, F55D (all p. 2).

240 MOA, TC/14 79-86, M40B (p. 6); TC/14 154–186, F45B (p. 2), F55D, M50C (p. 3).

241 MOA, TC/14 154-186, M50C (p. 3).

242 MOA, TC/14 79-86, M50C (p. 5), M40B, F30B (p. 6), TC/14 154-186, F45B, F40C (p. 2), M60D (p. 4).

243 MOA, TC/14 79-86, M30D, M35C (p. 5), M40C, F25D, M45D, M50D (p. 7).

244 MOA, TC/14 79-86, F25D (p. 7). Also see TC/14 79-86, F30C, M30D, M35C (p. 5), M45D (p. 7).

245 MOA, TC/14 79-86, M40C (p. 7).

246 MOA, TC/14 79-86, F70D (p. 3).

247 MOA, TC/14 79-86, M60C (p. 3).

248 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 369–70; King George V Jubilee Trust, The Royal Family in Wartime (London, 1945).

249 See nn. 1 and 2.

250 R. Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London, 2012), pp. 231–3.

251 Hart-Davis, King’s Counsellor, pp. 369–70.